Sugar For Bees

by Ann Harman

Bee Culture, March 2017, p 87

Feeding your bees is helpful, even necessary at certain critical times of year.

• Early Spring to supplement depleted honey stores
• Spring to encourage brood formation and population increase.
• Boosting the growth of new package bees and nucs
• Supplement during late summer dearth.
• Building up winter stores if needed.

In this informative two-page article author Ann Harman discusses sugars used in feeding honey bees:

• All animals including honey bees use sugar in the form of glucose, a simple sugar with only 6 carbon atoms. (Your “blood sugar” is glucose.)
  • Plant sugar is mostly sucrose (aka granulated white table sugar.
    • Photosynthesis produces sucrose, a 12-carbon sugar.
    • Plant fluids, e.g. sap and nectar, contain mostly 12-carbon sucrose.
    • As honey bees transport nectar back to their colony an enzyme, sucrase, in their honey-stomach begins splitting sucrose into glucose and fructose, both 6-carbon sugars. Honey in its final form contains mostly glucose and fructose, derived from plant sucrose plus smaller amounts of some other sugars.
      • When bees, or humans, consume honey the glucose is immediately available to cells in throughout the body. Fructose first must be changed to glucose before it is it can be used..
    • Bottom Line: Sucrose, whether it comes from nectar or table sugar is the same molecule, and both end up as glucose and fructose, suitable for bee nutrition.

• High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is another popular form of feeding sugar, particularly among large scale beekeepers.
  • High Fructose Corn Syrup is produced in bulk from corn starch.
    • It is cheaper, comes in liquid form and is easier to use.
    • Unfortunately the process involved also produces another compound HMC (hydroxymethylfurfural. (it is easier to simply say HMC.)

• Evidence suggests that hydroxymethylfurfural (HMC) is harmful to bees.
  • HMC is formed while making high fructose corn syrup
  • HMC is also formed when sucrose (table sugar) is boiled or heated to high temperatures such as when making hard-candy boards or hard blocks of sugar.
  • If table sugar is not heated no HMC is formed. This author feels that the best feeding includes:
    • Dissolving sucrose in water for “sugar syrup”, or
    • Lightly moistened granulated sugar, such as in sugar-boards and
  • Bottom Line: Ann Harman prefers using sucrose syrup in the spring, summer and fall, and sugar boards in the winter.