It is gratifying to hear that all the diets are being found satisfactory.  

We have come a long way from a decade or so back when the prepared diets available were pretty much limited to home or farm-made and a BeePro patty which was overpriced, mucky and heavily overpackaged.  It is largely due to the efforts of members and former members of this list that the issue -- protein supplementation -- has taken a leap forward in North America and the number, quality and useability of products on the market has mushroomed.

Whether or not major advances have been made in applying what was known decades ago (I doubt it), availability and competition have increased, driving down the prices, and, significantly, the format has been improved vastly.

Is there a lot of difference between the patties on the market when fed to free-flying bees?  I doubt it.  Huge differences are much easier to create in marketing than they are are to demonstrate consistently in the field.

As with many consumer products, marketers try to tart up generic what are really basic commodity items in various way to win mind and market share. and justify higher prices than competitors, while at the same time they try to find cheaper ingredients to cut costs and use recipe secrecy as a cover.

The fact that one product shines in one test and another product eclipses it in another test demonstrates that there is probably no clearly superior product in all situations, and also, possibly that the products being compared in each test -- although bearing the same name -- may not be the same formulation.  Perhaps the product used in one trial was a better factory batch or fresher than another.  Trying to get everything equal in these experiments is actually impossible.  

Some novel ingredients may be more perishable than others and further, they may be in the product one month and not the next , and we will never know.  (If we do not know what the ingredients are, we also do not know what they might become when they degrade, bit that is another topic totally).

Anyone who thinks this topic -- bee nutrition -- is something that can be totally understood, predicted, and measured has to be far, far smarter than I can imagine, or deluded, or both. <g>

Because this topic -- nutrients, mixing, storage, metabolism, etc. -- is so convoluted and recursive, once the basics have been covered -- and they were many years back -- people's eyes glaze over and they beg for a simple story or brand name to grasp.

Because there are now big dollars involved, this area is increasingly becoming, rather than a scientific question,  a marketing playground with all the usual bogus arguments, distractions for detail, and artificial distinctions being made between basically similar products. 

People easily latch onto brand names and assume, for example, that all the Mann Lake protein products are the same.  Actually, my understanding is that the dry product and the patties are different and that there are, and have been, a number of formulations of each.  The same applies to MegaBee.  This is documented.  Feedbee has gone through many changes and I am pleased to hear that they currently have a formula which works, because early versions were reported to have big problems.

As a result, I conclude that they all work, that there is variability on the products in stock, and that availability, freshness and price is more important than brand name.

Caveat Emptor.

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