# feeding old Fruit jelly to bees



## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

Your bees probably won't touch it. There may also be a lot of solids that bees will need cleansing flights, so don't give it to them in the winter. You could mix a little in syrup but it won't do the bees much good, it probably won't hurt them either. Just plain white sugar is best, or you can mix pollen sub, vitamins in your syrup.

You could try to make a wine or melomel with it, go to the home brew thread.

MB has a receipt for grape jelly and borax as a ant bait poison that bee don't go after.


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## tech.35058 (Jul 29, 2013)

Like FlowerPlanter says, there may be some solids in the jelly that the bees won't handle well, but you are far enough south that you probably have more flying days than not.
My bees check out the garden compost bin on flying days here ... I have taken to adding a layer of sawdust just in case there is something there that actually would hurt them, plus it gets pretty ripe before I spread & till it in the spring. ( I think a layer of sawdust, or dirt is recommended for compost bins, but I am not the compost manager


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## Matt903 (Apr 8, 2013)

On one of the farms I where I keep my bees, the farmer found some old jelly his wife had put up years ago. Unknown to me, he set it out in front of the hives, with good intentions of course. I wouldn't have fed it to my bees, but it did not seem to hurt them one bit. It was summer though.


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## warrior (Nov 21, 2005)

It's liable to give them the sheets. Don't do it.


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## Vance G (Jan 6, 2011)

I assume this is home made jelly which was undoubtedly made with granulated sugar. You have pretty well constant flying weather every day in Florida so dysentery can not be a problem. The only caution I would offer is to feed a hundred feet away from you hives so as not to get robbing started. This is fairly common practice actually. If there is a natural nectar flow the bees may not use it as they don't use any feed when a flow is on. QUOTE=Bowfinger;1376487]I have a few gallons of old grape jelly. Or at least I think its grape hard to tell. Of course it has a high sugar content, so I wondered if bees would eat it and if anyone had ever fed it to their bees before. What would be an effective way to feed it?[/QUOTE]


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

Some times jelly gets boiled pretty hard and is acidified; what about the resulting levels of HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural) which is supposed to be harmful to bees but ok for beeks.


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## RudyT (Jan 25, 2012)

Bees should not be treated like hogs (which are "given" stuff to eat).


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## Bowfinger (Apr 17, 2015)

well no rush maybe I'll try it in summer. I just hate to throw away $ugar. But since it is boiled, it is altered as yall say. Maybe it is not very digestible to the bees as regular sugar would be.


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## Bee Bliss (Jun 9, 2010)

Birds will eat it. Orioles love grape jelly. I think butterflies will eat it also.


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## Mysteria_Sdrassa (Oct 14, 2015)

I am not so sure it will harm bees or is bad for them. I am of the opinion that bees like other wild (and tame) animals pretty much know what and what not to eat. Last year I had a bunch of grape and stawberry jelly left over in the fall from feeding cardinals during the summer. I buy fresh every year and last years cardinal population didn't seem to be as thick so I had a bunch left over this year which is fine, I usually just feed it to my chickens because they love it as well. Well it turns out that my new bees loved it just as much and pretty much swarmed it and wouldn't let the poor chickens have it. This was in the late fall and I was feeding sugar already because the goldenrod was already gone but still warm enough to fly. They picked the jelly over the sugar cake. I just checked them a few days ago during our warm snap we had with temps in the 40s and the snow melting and they are all doing fine.


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## Terry C (Sep 6, 2013)

Bee Bliss said:


> Birds will eat it. Orioles love grape jelly. I think butterflies will eat it also.


 I was going to say the same thing , you beat me to it .


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## jcolon (Sep 12, 2014)

I only have one question. WHY?
Bees are not straight dogs you give food scraps to help them survive.


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## The Honey Householder (Nov 14, 2008)

We have a Comm. Bakery that give us everything under the sun. One year we had 20 barrels of strawberry filling that we blended with the HFCS that came one the same load. Just pour it in the feeder, but the only thing we had to dump the strawberry seed out of the feeder. I guess the bees didn't want to haul them out. 

One year we bought of load restaurant clean out (barrels of mix sugar, salt, and pepper). Feed it on top of the inner cover dry. Didn't have to use weed killer that year in front of the hives.:applause:

Bees will eat what they want and get rid of what they can't use.


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