Types of Honey Bee Feeders

While honey bees can sometimes cause you harm with their stingers if you provoke them, these insects are actually a benefit to keep around in the garden. As they travel from flower to flower to gather pollen from the male anthers, they accidentally fertilize or "impregnate" plants by introducing the pollen into female stigmas. If you want to attract honey bees to your yard, there are several different types of feeders you can use.

  1. Brother Adam

    • The German-born Brother Adam was a Benedictine monk, beekeeper and bee breeder, who is known for his breeding of the Buckfast variety of bee, a bee that produces incredibly large amounts honey. According to the contemporary beekeeper and breeder, Dave Cushman, while Brother Adam may not have actually devised his own bee feeder, there is a simple variety of feeder that many people associate with his name. It consists of a wooden tank containing the feed and a centrally located feed platform that rests above the feed.

    Frame

    • If you are interested in attracting honey bees so that you can harvest their honey, consider using a frame feeder. Frame feeders encourage bees to produce honeycomb, as they have very narrow spaces that do not allow the bees to fly around. They consist most basically of a wood or metal rectangular frame, which has glass or plastic coverings stretching across it on both sides. The Bee Journal specifies that a frame feeder should have small entrance holes, which lead to a feed bowl or well that bees have to climb up and over to get to.

    Hive-Top

    • If you already have a colony of bees flourishing in a brood box, or hive container, then you may want to consider using a hive-top feeder. These feeders allow bees to climb up for food and then return back down to the colony so that they can produce honeycomb. According to Honey Bee Suite, there are two main types of hive-top bee feeders: internal and external. While internal feeders feature feed chambers that dip down underneath the lids of brood boxes, external feeders sit over top of holes in the brood box lids. Both feeders have drawbacks. While internal hive-top feeders often result in honey bees drowning in feed and can potentially cause feed to mold, external hive-top feeders can be incredibly heavy and difficult to handle. This is especially true during rainy weather.