Improved nutrition the key to hive productivity and improved colony resilience during dearth periods and varroa infestations
- Boosting hive nutrition through strategic supplementary feeding is likely to become more important as the pressures on honey bees increase following the varroa mite incursion, and because of climate extremes and variable flowering patterns.
- Dr Madlen Kratz and her team at the NSW Department of Primary Industries are trialling different feeding strategies using pollen and sugar syrup to assess their influence on hive strength, performance and resilience.
- Their findings are highly relevant to beekeepers looking to strengthen their hives through periods of limited floral resources and seasonal change.
Honey bees are performing critical honey production and pollination roles against a backdrop of increasing stress, as fires, floods, drought and the resulting changes to flowering patterns leave colonies without access to adequate nutrition - yet nutritional support is on the way.
Researchers from the NSW Department of Primary Industries, led by Dr Madlen Kratz, are delivering valuable insights into how beekeepers can manipulate supplementary feeding strategies to improve hive resilience or address individual hive needs and increase productivity.
After losing all experimental hives to Varroa destructor in 2022, the project is uncovering significant findings on the nutritional impacts of different supplementary feeding strategies.
"It's becoming harder for beekeepers to predict and manage the nutrition of their hives with changes to flowering patterns and increased natural disasters," Madlen said.
"There is also increasing demand for beekeepers to provide hives for pollination services. We're trying to give beekeepers a tool they can use to build and maintain the health and strength of their colonies throughout these challenging times."
Experiments show promising results
The researchers examined how supplementing hives with pollen influences colony performance when building up nucleus hives for production. The team manipulated both the quantity and frequency of pollen fed to the colonies, and compared the hive's performance against that of control hives fed only sugar syrup.
They observed a significant difference in egg laying between queens from pollen-fed and control hives, particularly during wet weather. While they are still compiling data, the findings show that supplementing hives with pollen during autumn, for example, could be the difference in how well colonies overwinter.
"If nutrition is optimal, queens can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day in peak season. When nutrition is limited, the colony will reduce egg laying because it doesn't have the resources," Madlen said.
"The hives that were fed pollen had access to the pollen even when they couldn't forage and collect resources in wet weather. In the hives that weren't fed pollen, we saw that the queen slowed down because there weren't enough resources coming in to continue expanding the hive."
The researchers conducted another experiment during winter to compare two supplementary sugar feeding strategies, where hives were fed with dry sugar or a thick syrup. The bees fed syrup consumed it rapidly within a few weeks, while the dry sugar was consumed slowly over two to three months, and used primarily as a back-up food source.
"These findings suggest beekeepers can use different ways of feeding sugar for different purposes," Madlen explained.
"If they know they can't get to their bees for a period of time, they might be better off feeding a dry sugar, because the bees will access it when they run low on their honey stores."
The team is further testing its findings by looking at hive health using both observational and molecular tools.
The final research outcomes for this project are expected to be published in April 2026.
