article feedback request

it's reading too much into the survey results to make the claim that feeding honey will cause greater losses.

for example, it's not known if the colonies that were fed the honey were the ones that didn't survive, or if the honey was taken from the colonies that didn't survive and fed to the colonies that did survive.

most colonies generally shouldn't require feeding if the beekeeper leaves enough stores for the bees. one exception is a spring nuc that didn't have time to put enough away to get them through the summer dearth. i wouldn't hestitate to give them a frame of honey from a strong colony.

a colony that fails to produce at least enough stores for itself probably has something wrong with it. feeding a colony low on stores when other colonies have plenty could just be prolonging the inevitable. this may be part of why the survey results suggest that feeding either didn't improve survival or worsened it. it could very well be that it's not the feeding, but the reason feeding was necessary in the first place.

it's interesting that the lowest losses were found among beekeepers that didn't feed, and there are a number of possibilities for why that may be the case, but again the information isn't detailed enough to drawn any firm conclusions.

hopefully next year's survey will get more detailed so these nuances can be teased out.

The bee informed survey is certainly a valuable, and interesting resource. But imo it is necessary to consider what lies behind it.

Statistically hives that were not fed had higher survival than those that were fed. Bear in mind that a lot of participants in the survey are relatively new beekeepers. Commercial beekeepers rarely feed honey, preferring syrup, so they are out of this mix. It's likely those feeding honey included a disproportionate number of nubees who are likely to screw their hive up one way or another anyway. The hives that were not fed honey likely had higher survival because they were not fed, cos they already had enough stores, hence well prepared hives more likely to survive.

If the question had been what was the highest survival of only the starving hives, those fed honey or those not, the answer would have been the opposite, those fed would have had better odds. IE, if you find your hive starving, feed it.

You always have to be careful when reading an article that is interpreting the results in someone else's study. Does the actual data support the conclusions they are drawing?

The results are in response to a survey and ask very generally:

Which, if any of the following, did you apply to a majority of your colonies between April 1, 2012 and March, 2013?
-Candy
-Dry sugar
-High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
-Honey
-Sugar syrup
-Wet supers

Click to expand...

From the start, this isn't a study of hive mortality so much as it is a study of management practice. In other words, it isn't a controlled experiment that is examining the efficacy of various feed types. Knowing that, you can read the data little differently. You can't quite conclude that feeding honey is harmful, as the interpreted article suggests, but you can conclude that respondents who feed honey as part of their management practice were less successful than other respondents.

It's also important to not read into the survey your own biases. The data doesn't support the assertion that the survey was taken by newbees, for example. It doesn't appear that the question of experience was asked. You can look at the data to determine average numbers of hives managed and see, for example, that in 2013 the average number of hives managed by those feeding honey was only 9.9 while the average number of hives by those feeding HFCS was 1521. You can probably draw some reasonable conclusions from that about scale of operations, like the respondents were not limited to backyard hobbyists. But you can't conclude a thing about years of experience.

cryptobrian said:

You can't quite conclude that feeding honey is harmful, as the interpreted article suggests, but you can conclude that respondents who feed honey as part of their management practice were less successful than other respondents.

Click to expand...

agreed brian. i thought that the following statement about changing management practices was stretching the interpretation of the findings a bit:

"Up to now, I thought I was helping my colonies when I provided supplemental carbohydrates. In fact, I have jars of syrup on several newly installed packages right now (5/12/2014). But these results will definitely change my practices where honey is concerned and may change my practices where syrup is concerned as well. Why would I want to go to all that extra work to end up hurting my colonies?"

(emphasis mine)

i noticed that the author has a beekeeping background but his credentialing is outside of entomology. i am thankful for the survey and the effort put forth by the folks involved. i feel that it has helped to give direction for more detailed scientific inquiry, but we do have to be careful about reading too much or too little into the findings.