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Please don't feed my bees 🙏🚫🍯🐝
The past few weeks I've seen post after post about how bees are starving. How if you just feed them their futures will be so much more optimistic. Most of this originated from a post reportedly shared by Sir David Attenborough who was reflecting on a situation and context far different to that in which we live in Australia. He was talking about a geographical area where honey bees and bumble bees are native insects; where they exist in both a managed and unmanaged (natural) context and where they are fighting pests and diseases that are yet to reach our shores.
In Australia, Apis Mellifera, the European Honeybee, is an introduced species. For the most part, they're managed by beekeepers who have taken on the responsibility to care for their bees. While not all beekeepers make the best choices, it is ultimately their role to decide on the needs of the colonies they own. Most of us choose not to feed our bees. Instead we make conservative decisions about honey harvesting to ensure that they can live on the nectar and pollen they forage from natural sources. If my bees were at risk of starvation I would be the first to intervene to feed them to help them through.
The suggestions on posts I've seen started with a teaspoon of sugar syrup for a solitary fatigued bee and have progressed to suggestions of filling birdbaths and buckets with syrup with floats/pebbles. One post even had people saying they buy honey from the supermarket to feed bees! Knowing that others may be feeding my bees unnecessarily with open air feeders is really sad for me. They have surplus honey they made to feed on which is nutritionally far superior than heavily processed man-made cane sugars. Most importantly, it is against the Biosecurity Code of Practice in Australia to feed honey. This practice carries a very high risk of spreading diseases such as AFB, which would mean certain death for a bee colony and likely many more hives in the vicinity. In areas of extreme drought conditions as we're seeing in parts of NSW and QLD, many are already feeding their bees. When we do so we avoid certain sugars which can cause dysentery for the bees and often incorporate specific additives to improve their health. Bees will store syrup in the same way they do nectar, thus making tainted honey if enough is provided for them. Ultimately we only feed when there is no other choice and this is the reason why Australian honey can be relied upon for quality and its pure state. I prefer my honey to come from nectar gathered from flowers rather than cane sugar or corn syrup, which pervades most things we eat these days.
So pretty please with cherry on top, can I ask Aussie good Samaritans to think twice about feeding bees. Bees can and will die from exhaustion, but making sugary food sources available to save lethargic Bees may be doing more damage than good.
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