# How much sugar gives how much drawn comb?



## Eek-a-beek (Oct 9, 2010)

Being a beginner I am surprised by how much sugar it took. During build up, my 3 hives drew 6 deeps and yielded 1.5 lbs of wax. In so doing they consumed about 275 quarts 1:1 syrup made from about 345 lbs sugar of which 50 lbs were recovered as 5 gallons of extracted sugar honey (immediately fed back as pasturized medicated syrup.) That was all they accomplished for the year, except for one hive that drew and filled a couple of super frames during the fall honey flow. How does this compare?

DETAILS: Last year I hived a feral colony in two intermediate (7 5/8") boxes of drawn comb provided by a friend of the family. I did not feed them and so they ignored the deep of foundation I had put over them and drew zero comb all summer. They wintered over well and came out roaring in the spring, perhaps in part because I had learned I should feed them and started doing so in March. They made queen cells in abundance so I split the hive three ways, giving the spun off hives two frames each of brood and queen cells and a third frame of pollen. All three hives survived and flourished. After some shuffling of frames around I had one colony in a deep of new foundation that they were quickly drawing out and the other two colonies each primarily in the initial two boxes of drawn comb but working on deeps put over them. Each hive had two Boardman feeders of quart capacity on the front that I kept full with 1:1 syrup. This syrup was diluted from 2:1 which was easier to store. I simmered each batch of syrup with lemon juice to invert it; I had heard they like lemon and although they work hard at inverting table sugar, they have trouble completing the process and so sucrose honey crystalizes on them in a nasty way.

The 1st hive to finish its 2 deeps was the one without old comb, it had used 75 lbs of sugar. I stopped feeding it and put on a super. It then went on to draw two super frames which yielded 3 pints of true honey during the fall honey flow, a moral victory and proof of principal to those asking pointed questions, if not a quantity of much value for its size. The other two hives consumed well over a hundred pounds of sugar each before finishing their deeps, which they did just before the end of the season. Near the end I shook out the bees from the old comb and moved the old boxes on top above queen excluders so I could retire those boxes from use as brood comb. In the end their contents had to be spun out to ready the comb for the spring, so I could feed back the sugar honey to them as fumagillen medicated syrup, and so I could set them up to winter over in two deeps each.

During the year, before I realized that foundation had to be snugged up tight against itself leaving a big gap at the walls, I had trouble with the bees forming curtains of comb that they stood off from the foundation. This lead to a big pile of trimmings. A second pile of trimmings was the result of having to put super frames in deep boxes initially; the bees hung comb from the bottoms of the frames which got cut off in the end. A third source of wax was the cappings. I melted all this together in a pot of boiling water and when it cooled I wound up with a thick disk of wax weighing 1.5 pounds.

By the way, I had an eclectic mix of foundations due to a failure of knowledge and assertiveness. There were two sets of black Pierco (wax dipped), two sets of black Plasticell (not waxed), and two sets of Duragilt. It made absolutely no difference to the bees. They ignored everything last year and butchered everything this year until I snugged the frames up properly. Then they drew everything enthusiastically and nicely. By the time their numbers were up and I gave them their second boxes they would ignore the new foundation for a couple of weeks and then they would suddenly make dramatic progress on all frames including those on the ends near the wall.


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## scdw43 (Aug 14, 2008)

Try this site.

http://www.beekeeping.com/goodies/conversions_bee.htm


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## Eek-a-beek (Oct 9, 2010)

Thank you scdw43.

I tried playing with their conversion calculators, the "Sugar Stored (US)" one together with the "Foundation Drawing (US)" seems to want to give me the relevant estimate.

However, something is wrong with their "Foundation Drawing (US)" calculator because if I enter that 10 Full Depth Frames are to be drawn then it says this will take 11 Pounds Sugar Fed or equivalently 51.793 Quarts Syrup Fed (of 9:5 concentration S:W) but this can not be correct. It does not agree with their "Sugar Stored (US)" calculator which says that 11 pounds of sugar produces 6.2176 quarts of 9:5 syrup.

If I assume the error is just an isolated typo in the code for only that column of the "Sugar Fed (Pounds)" of the "Foundation Drawing (US)" calculator and take their answer for "Syrup Fed (Quarts)" as correct then it says that for 6 deep boxes I would use 310.76 quarts of 9:5 syrup. Putting that into the "Sugar Stored (US)" calculator returns that it would take 549.79 pounds of sugar to make that much syrup.

By that estimate I got off easy.


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## Omie (Nov 10, 2009)

Eek-a-beek said:


> Being a beginner I am surprised by how much sugar it took. During build up, my 3 hives drew 6 deeps and yielded 1.5 lbs of wax. In so doing they consumed about 275 quarts 1:1 syrup made from about 345 lbs sugar of which 50 lbs were recovered as 5 gallons of extracted sugar honey (immediately fed back as pasturized medicated syrup.) That was all they accomplished for the year, except for one hive that drew and filled a couple of super frames during the fall honey flow. How does this compare?


I can only compare it to my own year:
I am in the northeast as well. My two new hives drew 4 deeps this year- same as yours, two deeps each. I fed sugar syrup for two weeks when I first installed them- about 1 gallon total per hive, in a ziploc bag inside the hives. After that they were on their own, food-wise.
I didn't feed any more sugar or anything else this year. I didn't make 275 quarts of 1:1, but I did make 20 quarts of really good apple sauce last week. I didn't extract sugar syrup from the combs and heat it/ medicate it/ and feed it back to the bees for them to put back in the combs again. That just sounds like too much work to me!

My hives spent the summer building up their population and comb nicely, and bringing in nectar and pollen. They filled their 2 deeps each, and they messed around a little with a super I put on top just in case they needed more room, but nothing much came of the supers this year, and I removed them a few weeks ago. 
They put away a nice amount of honey this Fall, the brood boxes were incredibly heavy. So they will be on their own this winter, eating their own honey. I didn't try to take any honey this their first year, but rather left them everything they made in their deep brood boxes. My goal was just to have them go strong into winter, to survive for next year. 
I hope to make a new 3rd hive from a few frames taken next Spring while I checkerboard these two hives (assuming they survive the winter). I'm really hoping to get some honey next year.


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

I've read 6 or 7 pounds of honey/syrup to make one pound of wax. 
So whats the weight of the wax on a drawn comb?


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## Countryboy (Feb 15, 2009)

IIRC, there were a couple studies that fed honey to bees and they said it takes 7-11 pounds of honey to produce a pound of wax.

_By that estimate I got off easy. _

Keep in mind that your bees were (hopefully) bringing in nectar while also being fed syrup.


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## Omie (Nov 10, 2009)

Countryboy said:


> IIRC, there were a couple studies that fed honey to bees and they said it takes 7-11 pounds of honey to produce a pound of wax...
> Keep in mind that your bees were (hopefully) bringing in nectar while also being fed syrup.


I think this study and this oft repeated saying was rather debatable, based on a mere handful of hives long ago, and has been discussed a few times already on this forum.
But that aside, I think the original poster is talking about frames of comb, not pounds of wax. And he's talking about feeding syrup, not honey. Apparently he fed each hive over 100 lbs of sugar and wound up with two deeps of comb each (built on foundation). 
It's a bit confusing to try to calculate something like that really, because for example I didn't feed any sugar beyond the initial 5 lbs, and I wound up with the same amount of new comb as he did. So we have to also consider, as you point out, that his bees might actually have drawn a decent amount of comb without any syrup feedings, like mine did on their natural nectar diet. Thus, it's misleading to conclude that in his case 100 lbs of sugar = two deeps of comb made.


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## scdw43 (Aug 14, 2008)

I don't know if it is the amount of sugar you feed or how long you feed it. In the late spring and summer, I put four lbs of sugar in a gallon jug and then fill the jug with water. This is nuc feed for drawing combs and feeding larva, works good. I give each 5 frame nuc about 1/2 gallon a week, a quart at a time. I have had better luck feeding a little along. The bees think the flow is still going on and continue to draw comb. In a dearth it is hard to get them started back drawing comb if they stop.


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## Eek-a-beek (Oct 9, 2010)

Omie, the difference between us is baffling. If doing nothing had worked for me last year then I would not have changed to a policy of feeding them as much as they want all this summer. Perhaps last year's result was because I threw them into a couple of boxes of drawn comb rather than onto blank foundation. Perhaps you have better foraging there. I wish I could make sense of it. One thing that seems to be the case is that once a box of comb is drawn, it must be filled up before they will go on to draw another. This suggests it takes at least the 50 odd pounds of sugar in the honey a deep can hold to make them move up, the first box being perhaps an exception because it gets filled with brood. Maybe that is not an exception though if a cell of honey is needed to feed each larva.

KQ6AR & Countryboy, okay lets take 7 pounds of honey for a pound of wax since it is in both ranges. Honey is what, 83% sugar? That gives 5.8 pounds of sugar per pound of wax. I harvested 1.5 pounds wax which implies 8.7 pounds of sugar. There is a line of reasoning that says I should subtract that from the 375 pounds of sugar they consumed. It turns out not to make much of a difference but it is good to know. I listed the wax total of the harvest just in case it might matter.

KQ6AR, the weight of wax on a drawn comb would be nice to know. That would allow the other line of reasoning which says the bees deserve credit for the wax they made not as sugar subtracted but as the frames that could have been made with it. I have an old version (34th) of Root "ABC... and so on" which gives 2 to 2.5 pounds per set of 10 frames of old comb. The 1.5 pounds of wax might have instead filled out about 2/3 of a box of foundation. There were the two odd super frames they made as well. Perhaps they should be credited with almost finishing a seventh box. However, since some of the wax was cappings, this may be a bit generous. Lets say they did the equivalent of 6.5 deeps, that is probably fair.

Countryboy, you point out the bees were taking in nectar as well as my sugar. You are right; I guess you mean that this can account for the difference between the 550 pounds from that calculator and the 375 pounds I fed them. They may have brought in the equivalent of 175 pounds of sugar in the form of nectar. Perhaps that is right. Still, I would feel more comfortable if that calculator was not so flakey.

scdw43, having fed them all summer likely changed all sorts of things. They did not experience the July dearth we have here. They did not have to forage each day as much as usual before the hive was full. That meant they did not wear out their wings and therefore field hands lived longer. The result was a population boom much larger than would have been the case otherwise. This number of bees eats a lot of syrup so the same amount of sugar fed to them would have a different effect from the same amount fed to a normal hive. I have no idea how to take all this into account.


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## Omie (Nov 10, 2009)

Eekabeek,
We should also remember that last year (2009) was a _terrible_ year for bees in the northeast- worst in over 25 years is what I heard. So it's hard to separate out things like drawing comb and feeding in a scientific way when you are dealing with two very different weather years.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

http://bushfarms.com/beesharvest.htm#expenseofwax

From Beeswax Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products, Coggshall and Morse pg 35

"Their degree of efficiency in wax production, that is how many pounds of honey or sugar syrup are required to produce one pound of wax, is not clear. It is difficult to demonstrate this experimentally because so many variables exist. The experiment most frequently cited is that by Whitcomb (1946). He fed four colonies a thin, dark, strong honey that he called unmarketable. The only fault that might be found with the test was that the bees had free flight, which was probably necessary so they could void fecal matter; it was stated that no honey flow was in progress. The production of a pound of beeswax required a mean of 8.4 pounds of honey (range 6.66 to 8.80). Whitcomb found a tendency for wax production to become more efficient as time progressed. This also emphasizes that a project intended to determine the ratio of sugar to wax, or one designed to produce wax from a cheap source of sugar, requires time for wax glands to develop and perhaps for bees to fall into the routine of both wax secretion and comb production."

The problem with most of the estimates on what it takes to make a pound of wax is they don't take into account how much honey that pound of wax will support

From Beeswax Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products, Coggshall and Morse pg 41

"A pound (0.4536 kg.) of beeswax, when made into comb, will hold 22 pounds (10 kg.) of honey. In an unsupported comb the stress on the topmost cells is the greatest; a comb one foot (30 cm.) deep supports 1320 times its own weight in honey."


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

A little food for thought,
There was a series or articles in the American bee journal this year, I believe by Randy Oliver.
The new research suggests that a brood pheromone might shorten the lifespan of the workers. In the fall when less brood is being raised there is less of the pheromone in the the hive, & the winter bees live longer. 



Eek-a-beek said:


> That meant they did not wear out their wings and therefore field hands lived longer. The result was a population boom much larger than would have been the case otherwise. This number of bees eats a lot of syrup so the same amount of sugar fed to them would have a different effect from the same amount fed to a normal hive. I have no idea how to take all this into account.


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## Eek-a-beek (Oct 9, 2010)

Omie, yes that is an interesting consideration. I remember that in 2009 it rained almost continuously throughout the spring nectar flow period. One bee expert that came by to look at my colony commented then that they were behaving oddly in that bees are usually shy of the rain. These were however feral bees; they ignored the rain and were foraging aggressively in spite of it. I had to put an awning over their alighting board to keep them from drowning in the puddles that would appear there when the rain was heavy. This was in part why they were so strong in the spring of 2010 that I could get away with a three way split.

My efforts here are a rescue, in part. We had a colony in our shed for more than a decade because we gave up keeping feral bees away and let them be hoping that if one colony was in residence innocuously in a shed wall then we would be less likely to have a swarm move into the attic or a house wall. I do not know if that reasoning was correct or not; it was based on the belief that bees prefer to space out their colonies in the wild. Anyway, since then we never again had an awkward bee removal issue.

Feral bees used to be abundant here due to the loosestrife which gave almost unlimited forage for winter stores. The eradication of the loosestrife means an end of the feral bees, some of the gene lines go back for centuries. That is a terrible loss, especially considering that feral bees are virtually extinct elsewhere in the USA. The disease plagues that have swept across America have touched us lightly because this area is not agricultural. Within the state it is the areas around commercial orchards that bring in the migrant flatbeds of hives for pollination that are the most seriously afflicted. Between that and the loosestrife we are one of the last havens for the remnants of the feral bee gene pool. In spite of that, environmentalists citing genetic diversity as a motive, destroyed the loosestrife. Swampland diversity is nice but we NEED bees and so bee genetic diversity is more important. The decision is incomprehensible to me.

Saving this gene line by hiving the colony and splitting it is worthwhile. However, I think it is the main reason for the differences between us. I did the split on May 1st while you surely installed your packages weeks earlier in April. I had to wait then for the queens to emerge, mature, mate, and start laying while your queens started right away. It was June before I declared my hives all queen-right. Your first wave of new bees emerged in May and were out in the field before June. Your colonies were therefore able to use the spring nectar flow for building and filling new comb. My first wave of field hands did not hit the petals until the July dearth had set in. Therefore, my comb building depended mostly on fed syrup.


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## Omie (Nov 10, 2009)

Yes EEk- I see a_ big_ difference in the timing of our hives, as you suggested.
First, my hives were started as nucs, not packages, so they had +/- 5 frames plus _laying_ queens already when I received them in the mail *end of April*. By end of May, I was able to add the second deep brood boxes on them with foundation only. They never progressed much beyond filling their two 10-frame brood deeps each this year. But that was ok with me for their first year. Plus, I'm happy that they will be going in to winter with their own real honey to eat.


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## Hartz (Sep 4, 2010)

I just weighed some medium frames of wired undrawn foundation, They averaged about 7 oz. per frame.
I then weighed medium frames of drawn foundation that had been extracted (comb decapped w/a hot knife) and bees having cleaned them up. These weighed between 12.9 oz. to 14.1 oz. with an average of 13.5 ozs. per frame.
Based on 10 frames per medium @ 6.5 oz of wax to draw a frame, I come up with about 4 lbs of wax to draw out a medium 10 frame super.
Based on 8 lbs of honey to produce 1 lb of wax, the bees need about 32 lbs of honey to draw 1 super from foundation.
If honey is 18% moisture, then the dry weight would be (32 x .82) 26.24 lbs
So if sugar has the same value as honey (for drawing comb) it would take 26 1/4 lb of sugar or if using 1:1 52.5 lbs of syrup. If syrup weighs 8 lbs per gallon, it will take aprox. 6 1/2 gallons of 1:1 to draw 1 medium super.
I have been buying my sugar @ Aldi's for $.518 per lb. If my calculations are close, it will cost about $13.60 (sugar only) to draw the foundation in a 10 frame medium super.

Just my observation

Hartz


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## waynesgarden (Jan 3, 2009)

A newly installed package fed sugar for a brief time and then relying on the nectar flow will build lots of comb with virtually no honey. They are building the comb with the non-evaporated nectar.

In her book, Robbing the Bees, Holly Bishop writes that it takes about 8 lbs of _nectar _to produce one pound of wax. Given that the bees must evaporate a large percentage of of the water from the nectar to produce honey, if her estimate is correct, I would think that the actual cost in potential honey (non-evaporated nectar) in producing the pound of wax is far less than the pounds of honey usually being quoted.

Wayne


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