Since I have some thoughts to share (and am hoping to hear thoughts along the same lines) which are not historical related, let us "move to a different room" for our continued discussion.

How do people feed their bees?

I have 2 categories of hives that involve feeding.
1.  A new hive that does not have drawn out honey supers. It gets fed out the wazoo until the supers are drawn. I call the resulting honey (and of course it tastes like honey) my "funny honey" and it gets dumped into 5 gallon buckets and I am the only one who gets to 'enjoy' it. This is expensive to do, because in August I can be feeding one gallon of 2:1 _every day_. For a month.

2. An established hive gets 10 lbs of hard sugar (no-cook candy board method; google that phrase for recipe) as insurance against starving, since I cannot feed in fall because I will harvest their fall honey.

So. I could work out cost-benefit analysis to better price my honey, with amortizing the cost of the sugar feeding over the returns from the honey supers, but I'm a beekeeper, not an accountant.

I am creating a new category of hive that involves feeding. New this year! Hope it's not folly!

I will feed 1 hive in august enough to fill 3 VERY specially marked supers with capped honey, for every 2 hives that will gather fall honey. In October, 2 of these supers will then be transferred from the fed hives to those who harvested fall honey. That's going to replace #2 above. 

What I had been doing instead was leaving one super of good honey in July for feeding if August was dry. But I want that honey, dammit! And I don't want to feed any hives that will be producing honey. I'm pretty sure in August that if I fed all hives 2 gallons of 2:1, I would get 0 in the supers, but not sure enough to feed them dyed sugar syrup in August....

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