Bees ignoring the sugar in the feeder?

[Richard M]

I have two new hives, each with a new split (2 weeks old now) and both have been successfully requeened.

Because it's now late summer/early autumn here I'm feeding them with top box feeders to encourage them to draw foundation so that we have two deep boxes with plenty of drawn comb and hopefully they can really get cracking in September.

I made the feeders from cheap cat litter trays, with a hole cut through the centre and then a 50mm (2") riser pipe inserted; the whole thing is then overed with a 150mm (6") pipe with fly-screen mesh over the top and an annular raft float made of perforated coreflute board so the girls can feed safely.





So of the two hives, one lot are feeding avidly and have knocked over 2 litres of 1:1 syrup in four days.

You can see them in this (poor) photo, stood on the raft having a good drink.



The other hive, well they initially had 2L of 1:1 too and this hive was also drinking it down but a couple of days after I'd placed it in there, I thought it looked a bit cloudy and then remembered that my son had been sanding down a tabletop outside and was worried there might be some sanding dust in there.

I drained the original 1:1, rinsed the tray with freshwater and replaced it, this time with a slightly stronger syrup (1 : 1.33).

For some reason,the bees aren't interested in the new mix, they are just clustering on the flyscreen instead of heading onto the coreflute. I've dribbled syrup thrugh the screen onto the raft and down the pipe and I've briefly pushed the raft under the syrup with a wire to help them find it - all to no avail. The just climb out of the inner pipe straight onto the flywire and refuse to show any interest in their syrup under the coreflute.



I cannot, for the life of me, work out why the second hive is completely ignoring the syrup and has done for more than a day now. Any suggestions?

[sc-bee]

A lot of beekeeping is location. Is your flow over for now? In my case once the flow is over it is hard to feed to draw comb unless you catch them on the tail end of the flow and trick them into thinking it continued. In my case they just backfill drawn comb and honey bind the queen.

Sometimes they prefer a natural source they have found to the feed but in this case you say one is taking and one isn't. So probably not the case.

There was a discussion on here last year about feeding very thin syrup to draw comb. I mean very thin like 1:5 or so. You might b able to find the thread with search.

[Richard M]

I don't think so,we have a number of big flowering gums in the area which are still going strong and I'm seeing my bees on them (they're quite distinctive) up to 1.5km away, also plenty of flowering still in people's gardens (I'm in the burbs), so I think the flow's still happening - they've drawn a couple of frames in the last two weeks alone and that was on a small serve, maybe only a litre of syrup to begin with as I had them closed down for 9 days while I introduced the queens and couldn't top it up as I was minimising disturbance.

As I said, both hives were taking up the syrup with gusto, it's just this one that stopped as soon as I changed out the syrup for a richer mix - literally a 15 min changeover.

So you think weaker mix might be better then?

I take your point on the backfilling issue - will have to watch out for that.

[sc-bee]

 Maybe one hive is opportunist and the other prefers the bloom? And sometimes some hives just progress faster than others. Lots of variables but sometimes just the bees. If you see no other issue I would not worry.

On the sugar thing.... so all know the ratio you are speaking of the sugar is usually the first number and water the second. At least here in the US?  Sugar:Water. As beekeepers we tend to beat ourselves to death over the ratio. In most cases the bees could care less. But the general thought is higher ratio less work for bees to store and lower ration easier to draw comb. You usually don't hear of folks going below 1:1 but there was a thread on folks experimenting with it a while back. And some folks feed 5:3 year round.