Effects of various fall feeding sugar sources on survival, health, and productivity of honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera L.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, beekeepers must supplement their colonies with sugar in the fall to ensure survival during winter, when floral resources are absent.Sucrose syrup is the predominant choice due to its high availability, chemical stability, and ease of use. However, upcoming revisions to Canada’s organic standards will prohibit the use of conventional sugar syrup, necessitating a shift toward honey or organic sugar syrup as overwintering resources. The implications of this transition on colony survival, development, productivity, and pathogen prevalence remain insufficiently characterized. This study evaluated honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies fed with either conventional sugar syrup, organic sugar syrup, summer honey, or fall honey. Key parameters assessed included winter survival, colony development, honey production, and pathogen development (Varroa destructor, Nosema spp., and six viruses).Results indicate that organic sugar syrup, summer honey, and fall honey are viable alternatives to conventional sugar syrup for overwintering. However, precise colony weight management following fall feeding is critical to prevent starvation. In most cases, a minimum of nine honey frames per colony housed in a Langstroth single-brood chamber or four frames supplemented with 12L of organic sugar syrup supported successful overwintering, although adjustments may be required depending on colony size and winter severity.No statistically significant differences were observed in brood and bee population development, honey production, or pathogen development across feeding treatments. These findings suggest that while organic beekeepers can effectively overwinter colonies using alternative carbohydrate sources honeybased feeding warrant careful consideration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".