It seems the longer these sugar water feeders are out in the forest, the more life that discovers them. When I first placed the buckets out, only the honey bees found them. But over the last few months it would seem the word has gotten around. With an endless amount of sugar many insects are now visiting my feeders.
I was not expecting this, and its mostly fine. But there has been a few greedy animals (Squirrels) chewing on the containers and damaging them. So as much as I like the insects to feed on them, the bigger visitors are causing problems with them.
Another visitor I am not a fan of are yellow jackets, these little things are nasty and I want nothing to do with them. I am planning on setting out yellow jacket traps to deal with them. These traps will consist of some rotten meat, in a one way trap. My honey bees have no interest in this meat but yellow jackets will go crazy for it. So I will be doing a build soon enough to trap them and kill these little nasty bugs.
Carpenter bees and bumblebees have found these feeders as well. But I am not so worried about those. And observing them they seem to all mostly get along, sometimes the carpenter bees compete with each other clinging to each other to drop them out of the sky. But nothing seems to be harming my honey bees so its all okay.
Since some furry animal keeps chewing on the containers and making them leak, I think I will replace them with some metal feeders. I saw some poultry feeders. These with the addition of some marbles inside for the bees to rest on may work well. And being metal should make it much harder for squirrels or whatever is chewing on them.
I have been quite surprised how I can just walk up to their feeders and they will not get aggressive. I have even bumped the feeders and made them all fly up in the air but they did not sting me.
It would seem as long as I am not by their hives they just treat these buckets like giant flowers and are not aggressive at all. That goes for the carpenter bees, bumblebees, yellow jackets and honey bees.
Since this is the first year raising honey bees, I am not sure when to stop feeding them sugar water. My understanding is the first year they will need alot of it. Since they are drawing out comb and building reserves to get them through the winter.
So I will keep feeding them until they do not want it anymore, I think thats a good way of handling it. Maybe next year I will not need to feed them so much as they will be well established.
We got a rainstorm while I was visiting my bee site, and I decided to go outside while raining and see if any of the insects were still feeding. I was surprised to find the yellow jackets and carpenter bees still feeding. But all of the honey bees appeared to have returned to the hive.
Quite a big difference in feeding when its raining vs not raining.
It was quite gloomy and wet, but the honey bees have feeders inside of the hive they can use. So even with bad weather they are well fed.
Once the rain passed the honey bees were right back to feeding on the buckets. Nature never seems to take a break, and I am glad I can help out some of the local bugs while I feed my bees I am raising.