I have been pumping my sugar up, but very very little ( a couple extra tablespoons sugar / cup water).

I could never have that many at a time because I always have one or two females that are too possessive and keep other visitors to a minimum. I would LOVE to have that many at a time. I have counted 5 at the same time but they were all either chasers or chasees. No one was feeding!

Next time I fill, I will try the double recipe and see what happens. Hope it doesn't give my little friends any problems. I guess it will attract more yellow jackets, though.

Dave

I don't think it's the secret to her success, it could be seasonal or related to her location. I've been swamped with so many hummingbirds in the past week that I just can't believe how much they can eat! I actually hung up a feeder filled with water in the house yesterday, to find out where it was leaking. It wasn't leaking, there are just more of them and they're eating more.

I used to go through a gallon of nectar every other week (and that was dumping some every other day to keep it fresh) in eight feeders. Now they want a gallon a day, with the feeders refilled mid-day because they're too small.

I think using that high a concentration of sugar is inadvisable, to say the least. The highest concentration I've ever seen recommended is 3:1 instead of 4:1 for winter feeding. Two cups of sugar for a quart of water is outrageous, since sweeter than recommended solutions are suspected to cause liver damage. This is similar to the red dye controversy - if it's not necessary, don't. The 4:1 recipe is safe, so please stick with what's known not to harm the birds. I hope that local paper gets some letters objecting to what she's doing, just like people would object if her feeders were filled with red dye.

I agree with DPallas, the extra sugar is not good for them. What's worse is that it was in the paper so I fear many well-meaning hummer-lovers will try the increased ratio in order to achieve the extra-hummer result.

We should all get the info. and bombard the paper with objections so that they inform people it's WRONG and potentially DANGEROUS! sheesh.

I wonder if that much sugar would go into solution--really. Even if you boil it for a good while. That's a lot! I'll stick to the 4:1...

I've written a letter to the editor - but would appreciate your critiques before I send it. There is of course a great deal more that could be said, but I just wanted to address the main points. Hope it's okay that I quoted some of your good advice...?

The one question I can't seem to find an answer to is the amount of nectar a hummy ingests per day. Is it three times its body weight - or six times - or ???
******************************************************

Letter to Editor:

As a hummingbird lover, I was pleased to see the front page photo of four birds around the Heddens feeder. But when I read that the Heddens are using twice the amount of sugar recommended by bird experts, I became concerned. Other people might be tempted to use this heavy sugar solution, too, and they should be informed of the potential risk for liver damage.

I shared this info with the hummy lovers at an excellent website called the Hummingbird Garden Forum: (http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/hummingbird/ ), and some of the comments were:

Â"I think using that high a concentration of sugar is inadvisable, to say the least. Two cups of sugar for a quart of water is outrageous, since sweeter than recommended solutions are suspected to cause liver damage. This is similar to the red dye controversy - if it's not necessary, don't. The 4:1 recipe is safe, so please stick with what's known not to harm the birds."

Â"What's worse is that it was in the paper, so I fear many well-meaning hummer-lovers will try the increased ratio in order to achieve the extra-hummer result."

Here are some recommendations from hummingbird researchers:

[1] 1 cup sugar to 4 cups water. (Cane sugar only. Never use honey or artificial sweeteners.) This concentration is the nearest to natural nectar in flowers.

[2] No red dye. (Although this is used in many commercial nectars, it is totally unnecessary. The red on the feeder attracts the birds, and they can see a feeder from ½ mile away! The red dye may not be harmful in small quantities, but has never been tested on an animal which consumes up to three times its own weight in nectar each day. It is sold commercially because the manufacturers make major profits on it. Why use it if it could be harmful?) Please note that the Heddens do not use red nectar.

[3] Nectar spoils quickly, especially in this heat. Try to hang feeders in shaded locations. Every second or third day, feeders should be taken down and scrubbed with a bottle brush and hot water, then re-hung with fresh nectar. If you donÂt have a large number of birds, put in only a cup of nectar so you donÂt waste as much.

[4] Also try gardening with plants which are hummingbird favorites. Lists of varieties, with recommended growing tips, are available on the Hummingbird Garden Forum and at http://www.hummingbirds.net/attract.html.

Is nectar from flowers or from your feeders the most important item on a hummingbirdÂs daily menu? No: itÂs protein. As someone said, "Hummers are miniature flycatchers, deriving their nutrition from arthropods (insects and spiders), and sugar is just fuel for chasing bugs."

Nicely done, Linda. My only quibble is with my own mistake. Technically, I should have said 1:4 ratio, not 4:1. Since you gave the recipe, no one should get confused, but I was wrong to state it that way.

DurtGrrl - if you have ever had "Rock Candy", that is made by making a super-saturated solution of sugar and water (by dissolving the sugar in boiling water). Once something like a piece of string is inserted in that very concentrated solution, the sugar would come out of solution as the water cools and starts to crystalize out onto the string! In the candy case, it's usually 2 cups of sugar to 1 cup water.

PDallas ~ Thanks for the correction. I'll change it in the letter so there's no confusion. Appreciate your looking it over. :-)

LindaSkyview

OOOOPS!!! Meant to type DPallas, not PDallas. Sorry! (Seems I'm having nothing but senior moments these days....)

LindaSkyview

The Experts came up with the 1:4 ratio, so I'm not about to change it.

The question has been asked on another forum...where did the Experts get the 1:4 ratio? I use that recipe, too, but I'd like to know the scientific reasoning in case someone asks. Thanks, Linda

Linda313 - I checked at least three sites before I sent the letter to the editor, and all of them said that the 1:4 ratio most closely approximates the strength/sweetness of natural nectar found in flowers. There are, of course, some variations according to plant variety, growing conditions, etc., but they pretty much average out at 1:4.

In plants there are also very small amounts of trace minerals and other nutrients in addition to the nectar, but these are considered "insignificant" for wild birds which are getting a variety of foods.

LindaSkyview

Linda313 - there is a thread here where our resident hummer expert posted a link to this article (PDF), where someone actually gathered flowers, collected nectar, and performed measurements (I believe Brix tests, which I have done myself in the lab as a chemist in the past using an Abbe Refractometer), to get the approximate percentage of sugar in the nectar of a variety of known hummer plants. It wasn't a totally scientific controlled experiment with independent verifications, etc., but it was interesting to get a general idea of the amount of sugar in typical nectar produced by favored flowers. Overall it was found that somewhere around 20% - 30% sugar (which comes out to about what the recommended feeder range is) was what they seemed to go for.

Great going LindaSkyview!! I sure hope your comments are printed--we need to spread the word before any hummers suffer ill results!!

Let us know if your letter makes it in print. If not, I would continue to write to the paper and even suggest a side article all about PROPER hummer care!!

Good letter. What was I thinking? I am sticking with the good ole 4:1.

Now if stores would quit selling the red dye stuff. My MIL swears by it. By the way, she has had exactly ZERO hummers in three years of using it!

Dave

Good letter--clear and well written. Thank you for writing it! Ditto Jardines1.
Jenny_in_SE_PA--I've had rock candy before, and was familiar with how it was made--I've not done it and was unaware that that was the ratio. Wow.

What a great letter. Nicely done. :-)

Thanks for taking on this issue, LindaSkyview. Even one letter to the editor can educate thousands of people, even if the subjects of the article refuse to change their ways.

Sound science is our best ally in these situations, but reasonable-sounding arguments don't always have science to back them up. Though the liver damage idea has been around a long time, I know of absolutely no scientific evidence to support it. The primary relationship between the liver and sugars is the conversion of glucose to glycogen and storage of glycogen for future energy needs. Hummingbirds rely heavily on this function, especially during migration when they're taking in huge amounts of sugar, so I seriously doubt that high sugar intake alone could damage a hummingbird's liver.

Kidney damage from dehydration seems to be a far more likely result from overly sweet feeder solutions, but again I haven't seen any evidence of that, probably because hummingbirds can and will drink water when they need it. That brings up what I consider to be a more important issue, that of safe water sources. Hummingbirds that need to drink water to balance a too-sweet feeder solution may be at risk from birdbaths contaminated by other birds' droppings, rainwater and irrigation runoff contaminated with pesticides and other toxic chemicals, and radiator overflow laced with deadly antifreeze. They naturally get all or most of their water in the nectar they drink - the safest source - so the sugar water we substitute for nectar in our feeders should be a safe source of water, too,

To repeat one additional point that I mentioned in the message that Jenny linked to, stronger solutions are also more syrupy and harder for the birds to lap up.

Thanks Jenny, Tzunun for the info. Special thanks to LindaSkyview for your concern and efforts to inform people about safe feeding practices. Linda

Great letter! Let us know if it gets in :)

Sorry - I should also have responded to the question about nectar/sugar water consumption rates. There's a lot of conflicting information on that subject, in part because it varies so widely from species to species and in response to weather, nesting, migration, etc. I recently used some published figures on the metabolic rates of several HB species and came up with a minimum of 2.5 to 3 times their body weight in 4:1 sugar solution. Smaller species need to take in more in proportion to their body size than larger species, and migrating birds may nearly double their normal daily consumption to build fat reserves. Put in human terms, a 150-pound person who burned energy at the same rate as a Black-chinned Hummingbird does on an average day would need to drink about 45 gallons of 4:1 feeder solution each day!

I know this is a very old thread, but in case someone is reading it again I'd like to point out a couple things. First -- let's take a look at the concentration of sugar in the solution the newspaper lady was feeding her hummingbirds. 2 cups sugar for a quart of water = 4 cups water + 2 cups sugar. That's a 1:2 ratio sugar:water by volume. At MOST, that's 33% sugar (1 cup out of 3 by volume). It actually turns out less than that because volume of sugar in a cup is not really a cup (air space and all that).

What most people use (1 cup plus 4 cups) is 1 out of 5 = about 20% sugar. It actually comes out to a little less than 17% (I've measured it with brix refractometer).

The URL below contains some very interesting (and since corroborated) research by Dennis Demcheck, which shows that 33% nectar concentration is not out of the ordinary in many "favorite" flowering plants upon which hummers feed.

Flowers are one thing, I'm still not sure I'd recommend 1:2 concentrations in feeders -- but if we're going to be critical of the decisions of another hummingbird lover, we'd at least better have science on our side. Not sure we do in this case...

Best wishes,

--Stacy

The caption says the person has four feeders out, and has counted more than 30 birds at a time. (My friends and I only average about 4 each.) Then it says "Her secret is her sugar water recipe. She uses two cups of sugar for a quart of water."

Stacy - if you had actually gone through all the posts in the thread, you might have noticed that I already linked to that PDF that listed some concentrations found in plants in the Louisiana area. The link had earlier been provided by hummer expert Sheri Williamson (posting under the moniker "Tzunun") in a different thread that I also linked to in my same post. It definitely was a fascinating article. :-)