bulk winter feeding

Gilberdyke John · Mar 2, 2017

Swarm said:
What about diseased drones entering your hives?

Beekeepers can't control that but luring large numbers of potential disease carriers to your hives is, in my opinion, foolish

alfazer · Mar 2, 2017

It's irresponsible from a disease point of view. If I had a beekeeping neighbour doing this within range of my apiary I would be pretty annoyed.

ladaok · Mar 2, 2017

alfazer said:
It's irresponsible from a disease point of view. If I had a beekeeping neighbour doing this within range of my apiary I would be pretty annoyed.

What diseases are you thinking about ?

So your bulk syrup container is robbed very occasionally by some far away hive, be it feral or what ever .... how is disease transferred ?

Only one disease we really worry about ...AFB, ... and in this case the invaders are the losers

PBee · Mar 4, 2017

ladaok said:
Internal sugar / syrup, feeders are the norm here. So as you / I, expand hive #'s
more and more feeders are required to service these hives for little more than
4>5 months

I was lead to believe, that feeding outside the hive, promoted robbing in a multi hive apiary.

Re-thinking the idea, I'm sure it will work. I know from experience, that you can't feed just one hive in a multi hive apiary, you have to feed the lot, or you do seem to excite the rest. Picking the right time to feed, and having excess syrup available, maybe once all the drones are pushed out ??

I inadvertently do this when I forget to close the honey shed door (about 100m from the home apiary). Robbing will probably only be an issue if you have weak colonies/new nucs in the area. As an observation it might be an idea to site an open feeder over 80/100m away from the hives where possible as I think this is the point beyond which there is very definite distance and directional information in the waggle dance. Under 15m is just round dance, food close by.