| Metric | Per hive | Total (all hives) |
|---|
How the math works
1:1 syrup (one part sugar to one part water, by weight) mimics a light natural nectar flow. Feeding it in spring and summer signals a "flow is on" to the colony, encouraging the queen to lay more and the workers to draw fresh comb to house the growing brood nest.
2:1 syrup (two parts sugar to one part water, by weight) is much closer to ripened honey. Bees still have to evaporate some water before capping it as stores, but far less than with a 1:1 mix — which matters in fall, when a colony has limited warm days left before the first frost to finish the job.
All ratios here are by weight (kg or lb of sugar per kg or lb of water), which is the standard beekeeping convention — not by volume. Measuring by weight avoids the ambiguity of how tightly a cup of sugar is packed, and it scales cleanly from a single mason jar to a five-gallon bucket.