>Recently BetterBee published this recipe in their newsletter on
www.betterbee.com
  14 cups (6.25 pounds) of granulated sugar
  1 cup of apple cider vinegar (Get real apple cider vinegar, not
artificially flavored and colored “cider vinegar.” A good brand is Braggs.)
  1 ½ teaspoons citric acid powder USP Do not substitute ascorbic acid.
  "Both the vinegar and the citric acid powder help invert the sugar to
make it more digestible for the bees."

IMO adding a mild acid to granulated sugar for the promotion of hydrolysis may be popular but I question the benefit to bees.  Especially if you use Braggs which has the mother and adds lots of particulate in the feed.  Bees don't need help digesting sucrose because they make more invertase as they progress toward winter. 

> The transition from “summer” bees, in which the hypopharyngeal glands change rapidly in size and invertase content as a bee gets older, to “winter” bees, which at all ages have large glands rich in invertase ....

>Invertase in the Hypopharyngeal Glands of the Honeybee
J. Simpson, Inge B. M. Riedel & N. Wilding

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00218839.1968.11100184 (abstract only)


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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