Supplementary diet for a coconut area: syrup and a soya-based diet

Supplementary diet for a coconut area: syrup and a soya-based diet

Approximately half of the bee hives in the country is under coconut or crops interplanted with coconut. A smaller degree of dearth severity occurs when the other crops (coffee, rambutans, durians) are out of season.

A diet recipe within the range recommended by CBRI, India was used as a pollen substitute with sugar syrup (1 : 1). The pollen substitute contained the following (parts by weight), and fed at 30 g per hive per week.
1 powder of boiled, skinned soya bean
7 ground cane sugar, wetted for starchy final mix
1 egg yolk powder
1.5 skinned milk powder

The results (Table 25) show that comb area significantly increased when given syrup alone or when given a combination of syrup and diet. From this aspect alone both were thus beneficial to be fed to colonies.

In the honey results the significantly higher honey content in the syrup treatments only showed that the syrup was quickly transferred into the cells.

The pollen data showed that given syrup alone bees will forage significantly high amounts of pollen.

The number of eggs laid were not significantly different between treatments. Thus the prevailing food situation in the hive was not influencing the rate of egg laying by the queen bee. Subsequent brood numbers were thus expected to be affected by food although brood records were not kept to check this possibility.

The male capped brood data did not show significant differences between treatments. However two of the four replicate hives in the syrup plus diet treatment immediately produced very large numbers of capped male brood. This behaviour showed that the colony may be preparing to produce swarm cells and to divide. This did not happen when syrup was given alone. On this basis it not recommended to provide both syrup and diet to colonies under coconut conditions.

Thus it can be concluded that a coconut area colony would benefit from syrup alone while a non-coconut area colony should be given both syrup and maize pollen as food supplements during the rainy season.