Veteran beekeeper Allan Dick, writing in the December issue of the Alberta Beekeepers newsletter, warns that a failure to feed enough protein to bees can cost the lives of colonies.
A year or two back, some very good beekeepers I know and who had fed patties for years quit feeding patties because they figured they had enough — or even too many — bees and did not think they needed to stimulate the colonies. Since they had been feeding patties for years, they had become used to great wintering success and good spring build-up and got to taking that for granted.
HOWEVER, this year, for the first time in a while, they had late winter losses and bad build-up that affected their honey crop very significantly. Sad, but entirely predictable. The patty feeding had given their bees an edge, but the charm wore off after they quit feeding.
Allan Dick says that his beekeeping operation feeds protein patties until mid-June at least, as many as a colony will take. After beginning this regimen, he “immediately noticed that the bees were more robust-looking, BUT the huge bonus was that our wintering loss the following winters stabilized at around 12% – 15%, meaning that 85% of the previous year’s colony count was viable in mid-April” — and this consistently high survival rate kept up over a period of many years, compared to typical losses of up to 40% or “even 50% on occasion. Small, predicable losses were a huge relief after the catastrophic losses we formerly experienced and convinced us that feeding patties was good, cheap insurance.”
Patties are expensive, Dick acknowledges, but so are bees. The cost of losing a single hive, which can be estimated at something around $100 or more, would cover the cost of feeding 4 patties each to more than 20 hives. If feeding protein patties can help colonies to overwinter, helping some to survive the spring dwindling that otherwise wouldn’t make it, and possibly increase the number of hives that could be split — the cost of the patties would be more than repaid by earnings from honey production and pollination, and the reduced work load needed to deal with dead or weak colonies in spring.
A short version of Dick’s article is available on the Global Patties website at http://www.globalpatties.com/pages/articles/cost.htm along with another interesting article on protein feeding from Heather Mattila (PhD Student, Environmental Biology) and Gard Otis — Influence of Protein Surplus and Deficit on Worker Bees and Their Colonies, the results of a honeybee nutrition study in Ontario.
“Colonies that had pollen supplements in early spring produced two to four times more brood than control and pollen restricted colonies, respectively, and only supplemented colonies reared brood in significant amounts before natural pollen foraging began,” Mattila reports. “The earlier and increased rate of rearing also translated into higher honey yields by mid-summer, when pollen-rich colonies produced two times more honey than pollen-stressed colonies.”
Written by beekeepers
Topics: How to Keep Bees