Mark at Kona Queen And Here are some more thoughts... Reply-To: Discussion of Bee Biology <BEE-L@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU> Sender: Discussion of Bee Biology <BEE-L@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU> From: Stan Sandler <sandler@cycor.ca> Subject: mixing pollen substitute Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi All: A few weeks back I picked up on a post from Allen Dick that mentioned that brewer's yeast was available at his local feed mill, but he didn't know the quality. When I checked at my local mill I was able to get a 25 kg. (55 pound) bag for $50. It was not "feed grade", it was "food grade" from a company in Mississauga Ontario called Champlain Industries. It looked, smelled and tasted exactly like (and might have been exactly the same) as the stuff in the health food store for four times the price. Another local beekeeper got "debittered" stuff which was in flake form so one might be well advised to look in the bag before taking it. Any good ideas on mixing the dry ingredients with the sugar syrup when making patties? I mix the soy flour and brewers yeast in a barrel. I dissolve the milk powder into the sugar syrup in a wheel barrow using a paint mixer on a drill then add the dry powder and stir periodically with a shovel over the next 12 to 24 hours trying to break up all the little lumps and get the gluey mass uniform. Last year I burnt out a mixer trying to "beat" it smooth. If it is not smooth I notice that the bees will not eat the dry lumps. I have thought that maybe one could adapt a gear pump so that the gears were churning away in the mass but the case was partly open. When the stuff is runny the mixing is far easier. Should I be mixing it runny first and then adding some more powder after to stiffen it? (I am using 2:1 sugar syrup and putting about 1 pound of dry ingredients to 1 American quart of syrup according to a recipe in the Hive and Honeybee). Regards, Stan I wrote the above post last night, but didn't send it because my internet server was busy and I was tired. This morning I had an idea, and put all the lumpy mix through our big meat grinder (a 2 h.p. job). It did an excellent job using the smallest hamburger plate. Everything came out completely smooth. We even used the sausage spout for filling wax paper sandwich bags. That was an idea I got from Mark Spagnolo, and although it worked well with the sausage spout it would have been near impossible to fill them with a spoon, and I would have gone back to slapping a big dollop on a sheet of wax paper and folding it up. Since pollen is the vegetarian bees equivalent to their relatives, the wasps' "meat", I guess the meat grinder was an appropriate tool. --- Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 00:09:47 -0500 Reply-To: Discussion of Bee Biology <BEE-L@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU> Sender: Discussion of Bee Biology <BEE-L@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU> From: Stan Sandler <sandler@auracom.com> Subject: Re: soyflower Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Allen wrote: > How well does the yeast work for open feeding? I found the bees were flying and gathering from an open bag of brewer's yeast when I was mixing substitute last spring. However, there is a physical characteristic to all the powders that I think is important to consider as a factor in open feeding. It seems to me that the pollen pellet that the bees are able to make from either brewers yeast, soyflour (full fat or defatted, I have tried both), milk powder, or calf milk replacer, or combinations are never anywhere approaching the size of a natural pollen pellet. Pollen is sticky, but I don't think this is the only factor. The full fat soyflour is also quite sticky but the pellets are still small despite the fact that the bees hairs are covered with more dust particles than they would get at flowers usually. The fact that the pollen coating has geometric irregularities and sometimes spikes and protrusions likely has some effect. The brewers yeast must have an extremely small particle size (Andy referred to this particle size last year on his posts about DRINKING pollen) and although I have never looked at it under a microscope I suspect it is very smooth. The dust is so fine that the beating of a bee's wings puts it airborne quite readily. I think that the particle size is not very well adapted to open feeding alone. I always used open feeding to get the bee's acclimated to the taste of substitute. I think the patties were consumed much better after a few foragers had brought some in from outside. But I had no natural pollen to mix with it. Like Allen, I also was quite influenced by Andy's posts last year about soyflour and Mark Spagnolo's "Hawaiian delight" (just pollen, brewers yeast, sugar and water) and as a result trapped quite a bit of pollen last year for use this spring. But I will still use SOME soyflour in my mix. My reasoning is that the pollen+extender has to be the SOLE protein source for my bees in Prince Edward Island, who will be consuming it before any natural pollen is available. So it has to have a complete balance of all the amino acids that are necessary for brood growth. A single source, such as brewer's yeast, is not likely to have every amino acid necessary. I know when one is formulating a stock ration that the usefulness of the ration to the animal is limited by the level of the first essential amino acid that the animal runs out of. So, when using soy protein for pigs, lysine and methionine are added because they are very low and limiting. Probably the reason brewer's yeast works for Mark is that the deficient amino acids are present to some level in the natural pollen that is mixed with it. I think a mix of several ingredients helps ensure a mix of amino acids. And I think the early formulators of bee protein diets, like Haydak, must have had this in mind because they tried a variety of mixes with yeasts, flours, wheasts, milk powder, dried blood, meatmeat, egg powder,... But I will be concentrating on the brewers yeast. It would be nice to be able to offer various ingredients to the bees and see what they like, but supposedly the bees are not terribly good judges of nutrional value. Which I guess I can believe, after seeing them gathering sawdust and barn dust crud. I enjoyed reading Garth's post about maltose in some powders, but although it might increase palatability it would not affect the protein value. Regards, Stan
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