How to make homemade bee feed? Detailed methods and steps

Everyone knows that the main food of bees is pollen and honey. If you are raising bees, the honey generally has to be taken out for sale and cannot be used as food, and feeding pollen is too expensive, so homemade bee feed is a good choice. So how exactly do you make homemade bee feed?

I. Basic introduction to bees

Bees are social insects, mainly composed of different types of bees such as the queen bee, drones, and worker bees. Artificially bred bee varieties are mostly hybrids.

Among them:

The social division of labor of the queen bee is to specialize in laying eggs, shouldering the important social task of reproducing offspring. Its body develops very robustly, with a big belly, and its weight is twice that of a worker bee, having lost the slim “feminine” figure.

Drones are the male “citizens” in the colony developed from unfertilized eggs. They live every day without working for their food, and their only role in existence is to mate with the queen bee.

Apart from the respective tasks of the queen bee and the drones, all other work in the colony is undertaken by worker bees. Worker bees are females with underdeveloped reproductive organs, but many of their structures are more specialized to meet the needs of work, for example, the crop in their foregut is specialized into a honey sac to store nectar.

II. Homemade bee feed

White sugar can be mixed with water and stirred evenly to feed bees; soybean powder, pollen, and white sugar can also be mixed evenly in a 2:2:1 ratio to feed bees.

The specific method is to first soak the pollen in boiling water to make it into a paste, then soak oxytetracycline in water and put it into the pollen, pour the prepared pollen paste into the soybean powder and mix evenly, then add white sugar, stir evenly, sift it with a sieve, and store it in bags.

Feed mixed with materials such as soybean powder and pollen also differs by season. The proportions and raw materials of feed in different seasons are not exactly the same:

1. Spring feed

4 parts soybean powder (stir-fried, crushed to require more than 80 mesh, can be crushed with an ordinary flour machine), 4 parts bee pollen, 2 parts white sugar (preferably a bit powdery), yeast tablets (2-3 tablets per kg of feed), oxytetracycline tablets (1-2 tablets per kg of feed at 800,000 units).

2. Summer feed

6 parts soybean powder, 2 parts bee pollen, 2 parts white sugar; generally no drugs are required to be added.