Feeding Bees and Social Media

The other day I spotted a Facebook post from someone recommending putting out sugar water to feed bees. I've seen a few of these posts and invariably the social media using public think it's great and a few thousand people endorse the post and a few thousand then repost it further spreading the message. Unfortunately what seems an obvious way to help can actually be damaging to bee populations. I was at work at the time but quickly threw together a quick post advising people that open feeding spreads bee diseases and advising against putting out sugar water for bees.

The post got a surprising response and a lot of questions, more than I have time to answer on Facebook, so in this post I'll endeavour to answer a few and provide pointers to peer reviewed information sources.

What's the problem!?
The problem similar to the well documented role bird feeders play in the spread of disease amongst wild birds, open feeding brings bees together to feed and pathogens can easily be spread between them. Whilst it's not unusual for a bumblebee or honey bee colony to have some base level of viral, disease, and parasitic load which they're able to cope with. However current agricultural practices disease levels are being increased through Bumblebees imported for pollination. It's also been documented that there's been a rise in hobbyist beekeepers who lack the skill or ability to manage colonies and their contribution to increased hive mortality. With increased risks from escaped imported bumblebees with high viral loads or Honey Bees from sick, weak or otherwise compromised colonies it's easy for an open feeder to quickly become a reservoir for pathogens which healthy bees can then pickup from either the feeder or other bees using it.

Different bee species have their own parasites and diseases. As well as the various parasites for example Honey Bees have the devastating Varroa Destructor Mite and Varrooa Jacobsoni Mite, Osmia have pollen mites, Bumblebees have a huge range of mites and internal parasites they also have their own diseases. A few years ago it's was discovered that Honey Bee diseases have actually spread to Bumblebees.Many of these diseases can't be treated, some are so dangerous that to control their spread whole Honey Bee hives need to be killed and burned - although Honey Bees have the help of someone hopefully monitoring their health, nobody reading this is monitoring disease load in wild Bumblebees or Solitary Bees.

Bumblebee being busy

Doesn't the same thing happen with flowers?
A single flowerhead produces a miniscule amount of nectar hence bees having to visit so many of them. Compared to a flower a single feeder with a small amount of sugar water in it receives a massive amount of pollinator traffic. To give you some idea here's the figures:
A Canadian study identified that a Dandelion flower holds 7·4 µl (microlitres) of nectar.
A study in the Journal of Apicultural Science found Royal Crown Lavender (Lavendula Dentata) flowers hold an average of 0.68 µL of nectar.
A Sainsbury's plastic milk bottle top hold 11ml of fluid that's 11,000µL.

One milk bottle top, equivalent to 1486 Dandelion or over 16,000 Lavender flowers

So one milk bottle top feeder holds the equivalent of just over 1486 Dandelion flowers or over a staggering 16,000 Royal Crown Lavender flowers. All that in just a small area a few cm across. You probably don't have a degree in Botany but you can probably visualise roughly how big an area would be required to hold that many Dandelion or Lavender flowers. Bees foraging in such an area will make occasional contact with each other and may even pass on a pathogen or two, however if you then focus all those bees on a small area a few centimetres across the unnaturally high concentration of bees coming and going and making contact with each other and it's  inevitable that pathogens are going to be rapidly spread amongst them.

A good analogy for comparing a bee collecting nectar from a flower vs. syrup from a feeder would be to compare it to the difference between letting a friend try your drink on a night out versus you both gulping like crazy from a wheely bin full of something everyone else in the city has been putting their mouths to.

What about bees sharing a water source?
Honey bees gather water and providing a water source is an excellent way to help them. However Bees gather far less water than nectar so again a water source will also see far less traffic than a bee feeder with sugar water.. For example recently watching a pond next to a roughly 100,000 strong honey bee hive there there were only twenty bees actively gathering water. An open feeder with syrup in the same location would have drawn a few thousand bees from the same hive.

A Wildlife Pond located a few feet from a couple of busy hives

There's too much conflicting information!Yes there is.. There's a plethora of bad information about bees all over the Internet from the misinformed, mistaken and even inept, it doesn't only come from random Facebook posts either: the BBC has been known to put out some terrible advice about beekeeping. Regarding bee feeders some organisations that should know better (the RSPB for one) actually sell bee feeding stations, which gives the public a very misleading message. A good rule of thumb for anything posted on the Internet is to ignore it unless it can be proven to have come from a credible source, in the case of information about bees a competent beekeeper would be a credible source. Whilst other beekeepers have actually posted similar warnings and my post of the warning on Instagram was met with nods from beekeepers and insect breeders as far afield as Hawaii, Germany rather worryingly one beekeeper disagreed with the Facebook post giving her pal bad information which goes to show not every beekeeper is a good source of information.

It's only a little bit of syrup what harm can that do?
In case you skipped the boring numbers above one milk bottle lid is the equivalent of 1486 Dandelion or over 16,000 Lavender flowers. A milk bottle lid seems like nothing to us humans but to pollinators it's a huge food store.

But don't Beekeepers feed bees sugar water?
Yes indeed. However if used this is for a specific purpose and made in a specific concentration depending on the time of year and the weather. The purpose built feeder is placed inside the bee hive with an entrance accessible only to bees in that hive so bees from different colonies aren't feeding together. Weaker colonies will even have the hive entrances reduced in size to reduce the chance for other bees to rob them and make it easier for them to defend. Any information for Beekeepers about feeding bees be always includes an admonition against spilling syrup in the apiary.

Only the bees in the hive below this feeder can access the contents.
A Hive Roof will go above it too.

But I saw a video of a Beekeeper Open Feeding on YouTube
Open feeding seems pretty common in the USA, it's bad practice. Perhaps if they did less of it they wouldn't make so much prophylactic use of medications such a Terramycin which leaves England's Beekeepers scratching their heads. Here the Vetinary Medicines Directorate imposes four figure fines on anyone giving bees unlicensed unprescribed medicine.

What about reviving a tired bee with sugar water?
Giving a tired bee a little sugar water to revive it will is fine. If you're only feeding one bee she's not going to swapping pathogens with other bees. Just remember not to leave it out for other bees.

Inviting aggression
Another danger with open feeding Bees is your own safety. If Honey Bees encounter a readily available food source their behaviour changes and they go from foraging to robbing. After that first scout returns to the hive and tells her sisters about the free food robbing bees can arrive en masse and become aggressive and frantic as they try to take away as much food as they can before another colony does. Aside from fighting other bees there's also a pretty good chance you'll get stung if you're sat in your garden admiring the bee activity at your milk bottle top feeder.

Who forgot the flowers?
The other thing to remember is Bees are Pollinators. They pollinate plants whilst feeding. If instead of feeding from plants they're drinking sugar water from a plastic container that's a lot of plants not being pollinated and will led to a dearth of nectar the following year. Look again at the photo at the top of this page. There 5 milk bottle tops being used. With each holding 11ml of syrup each that's 55ml of syrup, the euivalent of almost 90,000 lavender flowers that aren't being pollinated by bees.

What about butterfly feeders?
In short: Dunno. Never used a Butterfly feeder, being a beekeeper and all. Presumably Butterflies face less imported exotic pathogens than bees as I doubt anyone's keen to import more caterpillars however I'd be concerned that a butterfly feeder baited with sugar water may be found by bees. Anyway if Butterflies are using a feeder they're not actually doing any pollinating.

So what can I do to help?
A lot of people genuinely want to help bees and there's a lot of ways to do this. The most obvious is to still to provide food, but not in the form of sugar water. Feed them the natural way, plant native flowering plants, and water them so they're able to provide nectar.

The natural way to feed Bees!

Housing is also useful. A bumblebee house can be very easily made from items probably already in the shed or garden. A solitary bee house takes up very little space and mounted high enough in full sun on a South facing wall can hold a few hundred Mason and Leafcutter Bee nests. You can even make your own with bamboo sticks or by drilling holes in wood A regular birdbox is perfect for Tree Bumblebees, just remember to position it so you're not bumping into the thing or walking through their flightpath.

A Mason Bee nest in the edge of a Honey Bee Hive.
The young Mason Bees will emerge from those cocoons next Spring.

Something particularly useful to Honey Bees is a Water Source. This can be as simple as a dustbin lid with water and some stones to land on. Birdbaths are also good for bees, typically having a wide edge to land on and whilst the water may look a little grotty after a couple of starlings have had a scrub the bees don't seem to mind. Near my hives I have wildlife ponds with plants and surfaces for bees to safely land on which is also great for biodiversity. One of the apiary ponds has newts and Damsel flies at the moment.

Honey Bee gathering water from a Wildlife Pond

This was just a quick whistle stop tour of some of the dangers of open feeding bees and things you can do instead. I've intentionally not gone into detail about bee diseases as there's a lot of information already out there and unless you're a beekeeper you're unlikely to deal with them and if you are you should already know. Hopefully it will spread a little awareness and the next time someone posts a photo of an open bee feeder people will ignore it rather than endorsing it and reposting it 30,000 times. The bees have enough problems at present so try not to add to them.