This story comes from one of our regular customers, an apiarist named Mira who runs about 80 hives along the Front Range. Mira buys two or three reconditioned IBC totes from us every spring to use as automatic sugar-syrup feeders for her bee yard. She walked me through her build over a long lunch last summer and gave me permission to write it up here. The bees are in this story too, peripherally.
What you need
One Grade B reconditioned 275-gallon IBC tote (food-grade washed, since this will hold sugar syrup that the bees will eat). One 2-inch PVC ball valve to replace the factory butterfly. A 2-inch threaded NPT cam-lock outlet adapter. About thirty feet of half-inch food-grade vinyl tubing. A small 12-volt RV-grade water pump. A thermal blanket sized to the tote. Twenty cents worth of stainless hose clamps. A pallet to set everything on, slightly elevated.
The build
Mira cuts the half-inch vinyl tubing into a manifold that branches out from the cam-lock outlet to twenty individual feeder ports. Each port is a short length of tubing with a small bee-feeder cup attached at the end. The feeder cups sit just outside each hive entrance.
The 12V pump runs on a small solar panel mounted on a fencepost. When she wants to top off the feeders, she flips a switch in her shed and the pump pushes sugar syrup through the manifold for ninety seconds. Twenty feeder cups refill simultaneously. Total time: under two minutes. Total bee disturbance: zero, because she is not opening any hives.
Why a tote and not a barrel
A 55-gallon drum holds enough syrup to feed her yard once. A 275-gallon IBC tote holds enough to feed her yard for the entire late-summer drought period in one fill. The footprint of the tote is barely larger than the footprint of a drum. The cost difference is about $90 for the bigger storage, which she recovered in the first season just in not having to drive sugar down from town as often.
Why food-grade matters here
Bees are sensitive to pesticide residues, certain solvents, and a few specific chemicals (thymol, certain phenolics) that occasionally show up as residue in non-food-grade industrial totes. If you are feeding your hives out of an IBC, the tote needs to have been food-grade-washed by somebody who can document what was in it before. This is one of the few hobby applications where the wash documentation is genuinely consequential and not just an insurance question.
What Mira would do differently
She told me the only thing she would change about the original build is that she would have insulated the manifold tubing from day one. Sugar syrup is viscous and the cold morning air slows down the flow on the longer feeder runs. She has since wrapped the tubing in foam pipe insulation and the flow rate is even across all twenty cups now.
If you build something out of a reconditioned tote and would like us to feature it in the Reborn Wall, write to us. We will trade you a story for a t-shirt.
— Daniel Coyle, IBC Denver