Food for Bees

Do you feed your bees?

Bees get their nutrients from flowers. Pollen provides protein, fatty acids and minerals, while nectar provides energy through carbohydrates (sugars) and minerals/vitamins.

The honey bees’ diet is nuanced and complex, gathered from the diverse floral offering of the bioregion and stored for consumption in the hive.

As bee stewards, we often need to be mindful of nectar sources and potentially feed our bees. Reasons to feed might include: a prolonged drought leading to a nectar dearth, a long winter, a baby colony, and inadequate forage in their habitat.

In conventional beekeeping, another reason to feed you bees is because you took too much of their food and have to feed them so they survive. 🙁

Here’s the catch: in most beekeeping practices people are taught to feed bees sugar. Even if you don’t take too much of their food, you are still expected to feed them sugar syrup for all the above mentioned reasons and also as stimulative feeding. When beekeepers feed bees too early in the spring, it stimulates the colony to start producing more bees. This is because the sugar coming in signals to the queen that there is a nectar flow and she needs to lay eggs for new foragers to be born. Beekeepers do this to get a jump start on spring and build up a bigger workforce toward human aims of production and capital.

The thing is, sugar is not honey. Sugar is not bee food. They can survive of it, but not forever. It’s hollow food. Ultimately, sugar syrup damages their digestion and weakens their immune system. Beekeepers say you can’t feed bees honey because it could contain the spores of a disease called foulbrood. This is true, however, it can be avoided if you know your honey source (talk to the beekeeper your sourcing from) and also know if foulbrood is reported in the area you live in.

If you are going to feed your bees to help keep them alive and support immune health, consider feeding them their own food: honey. If you have to feed them sugar, mix it with some honey or alternate between honey and sugar. Remember, honey is bee food, before it is human food.