Mann Lake is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of beekeeping equipment, according to Jenna Prososki, customer service manager at Mann Lake. They supply everything from hive boxes, frames, bee feeders and much more.
Feed your bees regularly before the temperatures in your area start dropping significantly, to help them store enough nectar for survival over the winter.
Contents
Pro Winter Feed
If your colonies appear to have used up their honey reserves in late winter, consider providing emergency feed. Liquid feed may not be ideal — bees struggle with evaporation during cold weather conditions while an overfilled feeder of syrupy substance could leak or freeze and pose a significant threat.
Sugar patties provide an effective feeding method. These sugar-water mixes allow bees to easily consume them, with minimal protein so that their brood doesn’t start rearing early in winter.
Winter patties can provide your beehive with an easy and safe solution to help them endure the winter season. Spread across the top bars or make custom patties out of wax paper, winter patty are an effective solution in providing larvae with nutrition when pollen isn’t available and providing bees with essential calories during times when pollen is unavailable to feed the larvae and bees need a source of calories to make it through winter.
Ultra Bee High Protein Pollen Substitute
Ultra Bee High Protein Pollen Substitute provides your bees with all of the protein they require during pollen shortages, along with antioxidants, minerals, vitamins, and lipids for healthy bees. Perfect for beekeepers looking to increase brood production or prepare for pollination!
This patty can be fed alone, or mixed into any pollen feeder recipe. The wax paper wrapper keeps it moist and protected; place in front of hive or inside hanging pollen feeder for optimal results.
Bees will gather and transport back to their hive the pollen substitute you provide them, where it will be used to produce brood. This pollen replacement will help your bees make it through winter and into spring with enough strength to produce honey, as it contains high amounts of protein that encourages brood production as well as amino acids and other essential nutrients that enhance bee health and help ensure colony longevity.
Pro-Sweet Liquid Feed
Pro-Sweet is a ready-to-use liquid bee feed formulated to provide bees with both binomial and monomial sugars, stimulating their appetite while aiding their weight gain on hives. Plus, unlike sugar water it doesn’t crystallize or ferment making it easy to use and store!
This product is intended for feeding during nectar dearths, and contains disaccharide and monodisaccharide sugars to mimic nectar’s composition. Additionally, its low pH prevents fermentation and inhibits bacterial growth to ensure long-term storage.
Additionally, this product is manufactured enzymatically so it does not contain any forms of sucrose that strain bee digestive tracts and contains lower temperatures of crystallization or levels of hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF).
Some in the beekeeping community have voiced reservations about High Fructose Corn Syrup as a feed supplement for honey bee colonies, but recent experiments have demonstrated that feeding colonies HFCS Type 55 did not increase winter losses or incidence of Nosema ceranae when compared with colonies fed a combination of 67.5% liquid sucrose and HFCS Type 55 in their diets.
Pro-Sweet Dry Feed
Sugar syrup can help beekeepers replenish winter stores of an underperforming colony or kickstart new colonies into existence, as well as stimulate brood-rearing for maximum swarm resistance later in the spring.
Sugar syrup can be made by dissolving 15 pounds of sugar in one gallon of water or purchased pre-made in 2:1 thick syrup mix or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). We advise using only feeds without neonicotinoids like Equal or Nutrasweet; alternatively agave nectar or maple syrup should never be fed to bees as these substances do not meet bee food requirements.
An effective and simple method for providing solid feed is placing folded newspaper on top bars above your bee cluster, then pouring granulated sugar over it. Bees will easily tear through and consume this source of nutrition; we also offer top feeders which facilitate high capacity feeding with minimal chance of drowning bees.
