If you knew you were going to be marooned for 4 weeks, would have all the fresh water you needed, and could go to the grocery store beforehand and choose as much as you wanted of just one item to take with you, what item would you choose? This question was put to a panel of nutritionists, and their answer … tinned cat food! You may not be particularly healthy after 28 days, but you would survive.
I first heard the above as an explanation of the importance of a variety of pollen sources in the diet of honey bees. They can survive on one or two sources, but it takes a variety of pollen to remain healthy, precisely because different pollens contain different nutrients and in varying quantities. Similarly, I believe that bees may survive on doses of sugar syrup when they are ‘marooned’ (ie. in the dearth or over winter) but their health is impacted.
Sugar has played a vital role in evolution because it fills an important biological need for calories. Psychobiologist Gary Beauchamp suggests that “the most important thing in an animal’s life is consuming enough calories to survive.” And, for most of evolution, finding sufficient calories was a challenge but, when available, sugar provided a way to consume them in bulk. Apes, for example, gorge on calorie-dense fruit whenever it is available as a survival technique for the next drought. Bears and honey is another example. Children are notorious for having a sweet tooth during their developmental, high energy stages of growth, both mentally and physically. And for humans there was an added benefit – foods that taste sweet in nature are generally not poisonous.
So we, like most animals, are evolutionarily hardwired to consume sugar. This presents two problems. First, food science has advanced to the point that, calorically speaking, we no longer have those lean times. Indeed, calorie-dense foods are almost unavoidable – think of the variety of chocolates next to the till at a gas store. Secondly, the nature of sugar in our food has changed. For most of human history, consumption of sugar in refined form was virtually zero; people used honey, sweet beans, glutinous rice, barley, or maple syrup as sweeteners. This began to change about 2,000 years ago when peasants in Bengal learned how to boil cane juice into a raw dark sweet mass. Even so, sugar remained a rare commodity, and only some 200 years ago, with an industrial refinement process, was there a sea change in both quantity and quality. Consumption by the average American went from one spoonful per week in 1800 to almost two and half pounds today. And this figure does not include High Fructose Corn Syrup, a caloric sweetener widely used by the U.S. beverage industry.
Clearly there are significant differences between natural sugars such as honey and
refined, white sugar. The complicated nutrients found in honey – a combination of bacteria, enzymes and fungi that has taken millennia to develop – contrast with the lack of nutrients in white sugar; indeed the latter often retains a residue of chemicals from the processing plant, one of which is arsenic! Agreed, it is in minute quantities and is omnipresent in our food and environment (including beer!) but we measure toxicity in chemicals in parts per billion. For example, in the Dec. 2024 issue of Bee Culture, and citing a study from Cornell, Ross Conrad states that the lowest concentrations of neonicotinoids to have an impact on bees is 0.1 ppb at the physiological level, 0.9 ppb at the behavioral level (eg. grooming) and 5 ppb at the reproductive level – queens are less likely to survive and lay fewer eggs. So what about arsenic in sugar at 4 ppb?
These differences are outlined in greater detail in a forthcoming article in The American Bee Journal. Suffice to say that what jolted me into action five years ago was research which showed that bees over-wintered on sugar syrup emerge greater in number, smaller in size, lighter in weight and with their immune systems compromised.
In 2020, piqued by Dr. Tom Seeley’s work on feral colonies, my colleague David Papke explored the concept of Regenerative Beekeeping, which is the api-equivalent of Regenerative Agriculture, and invited me to join him. We are attempting to reconstruct, within practical limitations, the environment that honey bees have developed over millions of years, together with management techniques that are primarily bee centric. There are three critical aspects of Regenerative Beekeeping : using locally adapted bees, modifying the conventional Langstroth hive structure with an associated management strategy, and not feeding sugar or sugar syrup under any circumstances.
Does this mean we should not feed weak colonies in the fall or winter, and rather allow them to die. Far from it. First, if you do feed sugar, know what the impact on the bees might be. Secondly, if you do have to feed, why not give them honey? At extraction time, put a number of honey frames uncapped in the freezer for 72 hours to kill off any small hive beetle eggs and then set them aside in a cool, dark room. If there is a need for emergency feeding in the fall or late winter, replace one or two of the depleted frames in the colony with one or two of those with uncapped honey. Or you can use the same methods you use to feed sugar, eg. Boardman feeders, upturned jars or plastic baggies.
Five years later it is time to share some initial results. My annual colony loss numbers have remained consistent – about 10 per cent. This most recent winter I lost one hive out of 20 because of a mechanical failure – in one of the severe February storms water got into a hive (two boxes not fitting together tightly!) and the bees died. Mite counts are generally low – last year, for example, only two hives out of 20 required treatment. And honey production has remained the same – I extract one medium super of honey from each of 20 hives, leaving the rest for the bees. In other words, not feeding sugar syrup has not affected adversely either colony losses or honey production, and appears to have impacted mite counts favorably.
David wrote,
“I stopped feeding sugar syrup, fondant, or sucrose in any other form beginning in 2020. Although I had already stopped practicing stimulative feeding of sugar syrup and pollen supplements in the spring, now I have also stopped fall feeding for overwintering colonies or any kind of emergency feeding using sucrose. Instead, I left on the hives sufficient stores of honey harvested by the colonies themselves, generally amounting to a full medium super in addition to whatever honey was stored in the brood nest area. And, although I have no quantifiable data, in the spring the colonies overwintering on honey appeared stronger and healthier.”
In 2022 David ceased all mite treatments and lost 22 out of 25 colonies. Those losses were replaced by splits made from the surviving colonies; since then his winter losses have been between 10 and 25 percent.
As always, one question leads to more. For example, does the feeding of queens by workers who are raised on sugar syrup or who are consuming stored ‘honey’ that is basically processed sugar syrup, explain in any way diminishing queen longevity and productivity?
If you are intrigued but also wary about ending sugar syrup entirely in your apiary (after all, sugar syrup is what we were told to use in those first bee classes, when we knew no different,) you might consider selecting one or two colonies from which to withhold all sugar treatments, and monitor (and share!) the results.
Now please excuse me while I get my daily intake of honey. I can’t help it. It’s the bear in me.
Our Green Cathedral 