This Blog Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Supplemental Feeding

Published on July 10, 2020

Whether in a can or a jar, sugar syrup can help your bees get a jump start in spring

Beekeeping is an amazing adventure, but it does come with some ups and downs. The past few weeks, I’ve been talking to you about nutrition and how important it is. You don’t want your bees to starve and fortunately, there’s a way you can help prevent this disappointing outcome. When your bees need a helping hand, you can whip up a supplemental feeding. Whether you’re installing a package that needs some extra resources to get started or your bees need more nutrition for winter, you need to know how to feed safely and successfully.

That’s where we come in!

Let’s review what supplemental feeding is, when you should do it, how to do it safely, and how to mix up a sugar syrup for your colony.

What Is Supplemental Feeding?

Supplemental feeding is simply honey, sugar syrup, beet sugar syrup, or corn syrup that beekeepers give to their bees to fill nutritional gaps. Beekeepers also feed their bees to give them extra resources in the spring, improve brood rearing, and bolster nutrition in the fall.

Unfortunately for your bees, they are at the mercy of their surroundings. If the weather is extreme (hot or cold), it can spell disaster for the colony. When there are exceptionally wet springs, they can’t gather enough pollen and nectar to sustain their numbers. If there’s not enough quality forage close to the hive, your bees may starve over the winter.

While there are steps you can take to help your bees get the pollen and nectar they need (see our previous blogs from this series here and here), you may still have to give supplemental feeding.

But, there are some ins and outs you need to know in order to feed your bees effectively. For example, you need to know when to do it.

When to Feed Your Bees

There are lots of reasons you might feed your bees. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (1977), the following reasons qualify for the educational or backyard beekeeper:

To help your colony develop when there are shortages of pollen and nectar
To optimize colony growth for nectar flows
To optimize colony group for pollination
To build up colonies for seasonal divisions
To sustain colony growth and development during weather fluctuations
To build up colonies after pesticide or disease loss
To provide food for better overwintering

Let’s break some of these reasons down further.

Supplemental Feeding in the Spring

When you feed your bees in the spring, it’s typically because the weather is not cooperating, you installed a package that needs a little help getting started, or you want to stimulate brood rearing.

Feed a mix of 1:1 (one part water to one part sugar) in the spring, which yields a thinner syrup. The thinner syrup stimulates the queen to produce brood, which is exactly what you want heading into nectar flows.

Keep in mind you need to feed a significant quantity of sugar syrup – 1-2 liters – in order to do the trick. It’s a misconception that leaving out a small quantity, like a tablespoon will do much good at all for your bees. Remember, there are thousands of them in a hive and the sugar syrup should last them for a few days up to a couple of weeks of feeding. Some beekeepers will feed for 2-3 weeks in the spring, depending on the status of their colony.

If you’ve been feeding for a few weeks and the bees are not showing much interest, remove the syrup for a few days, then replace it with a small quantity of syrup again. If the bees start consuming the syrup again, they need to keep feeding.

How do you know when to actually stop? Inspect your hive! If the honey bees begin building comb and you see capped honey, they are ready to be on their own. Note that if you start with a nuc or you are feeding a preexisting colony, they may need less syrup; honey bee colonies that are just starting to build their own comb need more assistance.

Even bees that have a busy and productive spring and summer can sometimes start to struggle in fall, and that’s another time when you may need to feed.

Supplemental Feeding in the Fall

If you leave syrup out for your bees, make sure they can get in AND get back out

Honey bees need 60-90 pounds of honey to make it through the winter. That’s why we recommend you leave the honey for the bees in fall, especially if you live in northern climates. Northern living is tough on the European honey bee, and one of the main reasons they perish over winter is due to starvation.

Supplemental feeding in the fall can ensure your bees make it through the winter.

When you feed in fall, mix 1:2 (one part water to two parts sugar) to create a thicker syrup. What this does is creates a solution that’s similar in viscosity to honey, which means the bees don’t have to work as hard to condense and consume it.

Your bees were busy all summer foraging and they know winter is coming. They are invested in preserving energy and resources. Don’t make it any harder on them than you have to.

Besides knowing how thick to make the syrup to feed your bees, there are some important safety notes to keep in mind as well.

Safe Supplemental Feeding

One of the biggest concerns with supplemental feeding is actually robbing behavior from neighboring bees. Yes, even bees can have bad neighbors.

When you set a delicious, sugary snack out near your hive, nearby bees cannot resist the allure; they may also be struggling to find forage or doing their best to prepare for winter. You can’t blame them, can you?

Fortunately, there are a few pointers that prevent this from happening:

Feed late in the day – there are fewer bees (wild and otherwise) out foraging
Avoid disturbing your bees when you feed
Limit the size of the entrance to your hive

If your supplemental feeding draws in robber bees (or other critters like bears, rats, and mice), it can have the opposite effect to what you were intending; instead of well-fed bees with plenty of resources, you will have stressed out bees with less than they need. Plus, all the mingling and partying of different species and colonies of bees can spread diseases.

Preventing the spread of disease in your colony is a topic for a later blog, but equally important to supplemental feeding. But it’s not just other insects and mammals you have to worry about, it’s also what you’re mixing up for them

Sugar Is Not All the Same

When feeding your bees, you can’t feed them anything that’s sweet. There’s a whole laundry list of sugar derivatives that bees just can’t have, including brown sugar, which contains molasses and causes diarrhea in bees. Yikes. Here’s what to avoid:

Rhamnose

Xylose

Arabinose

Galactose

Mannose

Lactose

Raffinose

Dextrin

Insulin

Got it? Now let’s talk about what they can have:

Glucose

Fructose

Sucrose

Trehalose

Maltose

Melezitose

All of these words might mean nothing to you, so let’s break this down even further. Here are the substances you can use for supplemental feeding:

Cane sugar

Honey

Isomerized corn syrup

Beet sugar

Honey is the ideal form of carbohydrate-based nutrition for bees as it contains important vitamins and minerals and denying the bees honey can be hard on their health. It’s like telling a Wisconsinite they can no longer have cheese. It ain’t natural.

Whenever possible, feed your honey bees, honey. Always feed honey that’s harvested from your own hive. This ensures you minimize the spread of disease. Unfortunately, honey from another hive other than your own can contain bacteria, such as the one that causes American foulbrood. This can cause big issues in your hive.

Beyond safety issues, you need to know how to mix up these sugary solutions for your bees. Read on to find out how.

How to Feed

Here’s our tip: Crushed comb in a plastic sandwich bag with slits on top is great for your bees

To start with, make sure your supplemental feeding is in the hive itself. In fact, leaving extra honey outside the hive, even if well-intended, is illegal under the Livestock Disease Control Act of 1994. Don’t break the law, folks!

There are various feeding apparatuses you can use to feed your bees, and what kind you use depends on what hive design you have. However, you don’t need anything fancy to feed the bees in a top bar hive. In fact, we often crush comb in a sandwich-style ziplock bag, cut slits in the top, and set it on top of the bars for the bees to snack on.

You can also whip up some honey tea. We have recipes that are good for any season.

Honey can be expensive and there may be times when sugar syrup makes more sense. Here’s how to create some for your bees:

Make Your Own Syrup

Heat your quantity of water on the stove in a saucepan.
Once it’s just shy of boiling, take it off the heat and stir in the sugar.
Mix until everything is homogenous.
Allow to cool before feeding your bees.

That last point is an important one. Think about it: Your bees don’t heat their honey up before they eat it.

Your options are somewhat endless for how you distribute the syrup to the bees – jars, cans, plastic containers. If you set out a plastic container with syrup, make sure you place twigs, corks, etc. inside so that the bees don’t experience a drowning by sucrose.

Furthermore, you can actually feed your bees sugar granules or homemade sugar candy. This can be especially useful in winter leading into spring and with colonies that are already fairly strong. Basically, strong colonies can take the sugar crystals and use fresh water from near the hive (that you’ve left out for them because you’re an excellent beekeeper) and they mix it all together to create their own syrup. Amazing!

This works better during humid times of the year, like fall and spring, as the moisture in the air can speed up the process.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, it’s every beekeepers’ right to decide if and when to feed their bees, and like anything else, any beekeeper you ask about this subject will give you a slightly (or vastly) different answer when it comes to supplemental feeding protocols. That’s why you will benefit most from understanding the basics, talking to your mentors, and knowing your colony’s unique needs.

By beekeeping for YOUR bees, you will set your colony up for success.

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Caitlin Knudsen

Caitlin Knudsen is a content writer for Beepods with a passion for lifelong learning and psychology. She is an avid gardener, grower of houseplants, and does recipe development and food photography in her spare time.