I can't tell you why your birds have gone - hummers live here year round - but I can tell you it is not the sugar. Cane sugar is cane sugar :-) I have used many different brands of sugar over the years, often the house brands as they are cheaper, and you know how much sugar you can go through filling up feeders!! My birds never blinked at any changes and just sucked it down as always.

As long as you didn't make any other changes to the nectar solution, kept the feeders cleaned and full, I don't think you should bame the feeders. Something else caused their disappearance but hopefully it is just temporary.

The ones at my house were very active for a few weeks in early May. Now they seem to be gone. However, I did happen to see one very very early in the morning the other day. Most of the time, I am not up and around that early. So I probably just miss seeing them on most days. The ones that we get here do tend to migrate to higher elevation for most of the summer, then they will come back through our lower elevation again later.

They seem so unpredictable. Sometimes they are fond of a back door feeder I have, and there is much activity there.... Then they seem to tire of it and use the other feeder around the corner and I don't see much activity at the backdoor feeder.

I too, as popmama(z5 - Arvada, CO) said, had much activity early May and then a lapse, then another spurt of activity around now in June...and also very early in the almost dark morning.

Maybe there are some flowers nearby that they like or another person has a feeder out that they prefer.

Make sure your feeders are cleaned really well and just keep watching for them.

I set up a small digital camera on a tripod set for 30min. at my backdoor and just walk away and check it later and to my surprise they were coming around at times I was just missing them.

This is a blurry still from video taping them to see if they are around when I'm not noticing.

Annette, I too agree whatever has happened has nothing to do with the brand sugar. I will often buy the less expensive generic sugar, although if C&H is what I have on hand, they will have that too.

I was looking to see which hummingbirds you may have in Georgia and see you have wintering birds there, just as we do in the PNW. Now, I'm not twisting anyone's arm to winter feed, it can sometimes be an inconvenience in freezing weather. I do feed in winter, even those days its a struggle to provide food not frozen or feeders with food ports not blocked by snow or freezing rain.

You might read through this article by your Georgia DNR, scrolling down to wintering hummingbirds. Georgia DNR

Yours seem to be most reliably Rufous, while ours are winter(year around resident) Anna's.

I found that link very informative thanks for sharing it morz8(Washington Coast Z8b)

I haven't really seen many hummingbirds for the last couple of weeks. It's been very hot here so I think they mostly moved up to higher elevation. But yesterday, I was awake at 5:00 am (not my usual time) and there they were. It was still mostly dark in my yard but I could hear them. So I guess they are coming very early before it gets too hot.

Read the sugar label. Some have corn starch added.

Some store brands of sugar are beet sugar, rather than cane sugar. They are similar, but not identical. Hummers can detect very minute differences in the sugar water. Some people have noticed that their hummers greatly prefer cane sugar; others notice no difference in activity.

Individual hummingbirds seem to be like humans in their tastes--they differ. I've planted favorite hummer flowers, that get ignored for plants that aren't even on most lists. Or one individual will claim a plant as their own to defend fiercely, even though it had been almost completely ignored by the other hummers prior to arrival of the new bird.

Hmm, is it generally noted on the bag if it’s beet sugar? I will have to go check what I have.