Dual-Access Hive-top Feeder No brood-box room wasted and no disturbing the hive to refill

 

The Dual-Access Hive-top Feeder sits on top of the other hive components and underneath the top cover, as shown at left.  This placement makes it easy for you to check and refill the feeder without disturbing the beehive and without consuming any space in the brood box.

One of the poorest alternatives to a hive-top feeder is the 'division board' feeder, shown here at the upper right.  A division board feeder is a wooden or plastic compartment that is hung in a hive box in place of a frame and contains sugar syrup to feed honeybees.  This type of honeybee feeder is generally ineffective and undesirable.  BeeCARE does not recommend this feeder for general use, for the following reasons:

• You must open the hive to check or refill the feeder, which not only requires time and preparation, but also requires the use of the smoker.  Smoking and opening the hive too often interrupts the brood production cycle by interfering with the queen's normal control of the hive through pheromones.

• Opening the hive frequently causes the bees to become more aggressive over time, making them harder to work with.

• When this feeder is installed in the brood box, the box has room for only 9 frames, instead of the normal 10 frames.  You cannot use this feeder if all 10 frames already contain brood, unless you want to sacrifice several thousand bees and significantly limit your hive's brood production capacity.  With this feeder installed, the colony cannot increase their population beyond what is allowed by the remaining 9 frames.

• The design of this feeder allows many bees to fall into the syrup and drown.  This not only results in bee loss, but more importantly it corrupts the syrup to the point where the bees will no longer drink it.  Our observations when using this feeder are that there are many more dead bees in the syrup than when using a hive-top feeder, and the bees typically never consume all the syrup in the feeder.  Syrup that sits for longer periods becomes moldy and rancid, requiring regular cleaning to make the feeder usable again.

• This feeder holds too little syrup (in practice, typically less than a gallon), requiring the beekeeper to open the hive and refill it more often.

Instead of a division board feeder, BeeCARE recommends the hive-top feeder as a much safer, more effective and vastly easier alternative.

Dual-Access Hive-top Feeder
Honey-B-Healthy