> patties of shortening and granulated sugar but I've read somewhere that
> beekeepers sometimes provide granulated sugar alone. What can you tell a
 
Though you can feed dry sugar to good effect, for this situation I'd
avoid it.  Dry sugar feeding has the advantages of easy, little or
no extra gear, clean, no spilled syrup to cause robbing, little/no
stimulation of the queen's egg laying.  But it is at a cost.  The
bees to handle it must liquify it themselves, then evaporate off the
excess again - there is an energy conversion factor which means for
any given quantity of sugar, feeding it dry will result in less
stores overall.
 
Murray Reid, one of NZ's bee advisory officers who reads this list,
wrote a good article on this some years back - I'll see if I can
find it.
 
But for your situation, Marcia, I'd feed with as heavy a sugar syrup
as I could make (just at the point of maximum saturation) (knowing
that this will probably cause some responses from the others on the
list!!!)
 
How to feed?  Personal preference plays a lot in it.  As it isn't
extreme cold you're dealing with, it doesn't matter so much, so
either over the broodnest with jar, Boardman feeder at entrance,
division board feeder or over the top type feeder - machts nichts!
 
  (\      Nick Wallingford
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