Urban beekeeping ep.77 , strong hives and weak hives . Banana in bee food. - Video

Bananas and bees
In my wildest imagination I cannot fathom why someone would toss a banana in a bee hive. First of all, if it were that easy to control all the pathogens and parasites, we wouldn’t be having a problem. But putting bananas in a bee hive—especially a winter hive—is worse than doing nothing at all.

If you read beyond the wild claims, you will find other beekeepers who didn’t have such good results. Some found rotten banana drippings raining down on their colonies. Others found that bananas attracted every opportunist you can imagine, including beetles, ants, armies of unidentified larvae, mice, and voles. Outside the hive, the scent of bananas attracted raccoons, opossums, and skunks. Can bears be far behind?
The ash content of bananas
But to my mind, the worse thing about about bananas is their fiber and ash content. The fiber content depends on the type and age of the banana, and riper bananas have less fiber than green ones. But the ash content remains constant and can rank up there with dark honeys, the kind that many beekeepers remove from the winter colony.

Ash is the indigestible part of food that accumulates in the honey bee gut. It is composed of a variety of substances, including calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, iodine, zinc, and sulfur. When bees are flying, this does not create a problem because the bees can defecate whenever they want. But in the winter months when flying days may be weeks or even months apart, the ash continues to accumulate. At a certain point, if the bees can no longer contain it all, they are forced to defecate inside their hive. We call this honey bee dysentery.
Honey bee dysentery
Although not caused by a pathogen, honey bee dysentery creates unsanitary conditions that can spread any diseases carried by individual bees. In addition, the foul smell caused by dysentery can mask normal hive odors, such as pheromones, that are used for honey bee communication.

Beekeepers who must face long and cold winters with a limited number of flying days try to restrict the bees’ exposure to foods with high ash content, including dark honey or pollen supplements with high ash content. The last thing they would do is add food—such as bananas—which are known to have high ash.