«Pchelit»

Beekeepers in many regions (especially in cold climate that doesn’t allow bees to make significant reserves of nectar) widely practice partial replacement of honey used for bee wintering with sugar syrup to ensure the profitability of apiaries, to get the greatest possible amount of marketable honey. Also, there are cases when honey flow is scarce, and in such circumstances feeding bees with sugar syrup is an urgent need. Supplementary feeding of bees with sugar syrup is also used to stimulate faster growth and development of bee colonies. Such supplementary feeding will be fully effective only if the percent of protein in the diet is appropriate; there should be sufficient amount of protein for brood rearing. If there are no protein feeds in the hive or there is no pollen around the apiary the bees use their bodies’ protein reserves, and this leads to rapid bee wearing. The bees spend 20-30% of sugar syrup given to them on its transferring, processing and sealing.

Although there are many reasons that motivate beekeepers to feed the bees with sugar, this process had always been considered as an unnatural human intervention, and it is believed to have a negative impact. The absence of simple sugars, vitamins, proteins, mineral salts in conventional sugar syrup (there are a lot of these substances in nectar) has a negative effect on bees.

Scientists had made numerous attempts trying to make sugar syrup which composition would be as close as possible to that of honey. Nowadays there are three types of bee feeds made of inverted syrups, which are prepared by adding 1) acids, 2) honey or 3) enzymes to conventional sugar syrup.

In the first case sucrose decomposes to monosaccharides when heated in the presence of an acid - phosphoric, tartaric, lactic, citric, formic acid and others. Inversion is only 40-50%; some products harmful to bees are also formed, such as hydroxymethylfurfural. Also, the syrup obtained this way is poor in minerals, vitamins, biologically active substances, i.e. 50% of prepared syrup still remains the same sugar solution.

In the second case we obtain invert syrup, enriched by nutrients contained in honey (vitamins, proteins, minerals, amino acids, etc.). It is prepared by enzymatic hydrolysis of sucrose by invertase, which is contained in honey (I.A. Melnychuk method). The syrup is prepared from following components: sugar (74%), honey (7.5%), water (18.5%) and acetic acid (0.03%). This ratio of the initial components allows to conduct the inversion process in 7…10 days, the temperature being 34…36 °C. This method has some disadvantages: invertase activity of honey is relatively small and may vary; the process of inversion takes a long time; there is some possibility of transferring infectious diseases of bees to healthy families or other apiaries. Yes, and honey is quite expensive.

The last way of making invert syrup (by means of enzymes) is the easiest and the most promising method.

From the material given above it can be concluded that the most promising way of preparing food for bees is enzymatic inversion of sucrose. 1) It does not lead to the formation of hydroxymethylfurfural (obtained using acidic hydrolysis); 2) It makes the use of honey (I.A. Melnichuk method) unnecessary; 3) we achieve high degree of inversion (70…90%).

It is important that the feed obtained by enzymatic hydrolysis had the carbohydrate composition like that of honey. It is also necessary that it contains amino acids, minerals, vitamins – like natural bee feeds (nectar and pollen).

The urgency of the work of developing recipes and cooking techniques of new synthetic carbohydrate feeds for the bees does not lose its value today. Modern economic relations give special meaning this work.