Bee Feed
Dr. Gost Winter Pollen Cake
(1 kg) Special winter cake — pollen, powdered sugar, vitamins, enzymes and probiotics, tuned for the winter cluster.
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- No residue in honey or comb
- Usable all season, every season
- Safe to use during the honey flow
The same idea, set harder
This is the spring cake’s mixture with a different job in mind. Winter is not survived by the colony you had in August — it is survived by the winter bees, and what matters is how many of them there are and how long each one lives.
So the ratios are moved: more of the minerals and protein that go into making a bee that lasts months rather than weeks. And it is set firmer, because a cluster handles a firm cake better than a soft one that slumps into the frames.
Winter bees, more of them, lasting longer. That is the whole brief. A winter bee lives on what it was built from in the autumn, and the mineral and protein content here is aimed at exactly that.
It does not make the queen lay in winter. A common worry and it is the wrong way round. The pollen in it meets a protein need in the cluster; it does not start brood in the cold. When spring does come, the cake already sitting there is what encourages her to begin.
Real pollen — not a pollen substitute. The protein here comes from pollen. Much of what is sold as protein feed for winter is a substitute made from soy or yeast. Going into winter that is the difference that counts, because the winter bee is built once and then has to last for months.
The firmer of the two. The only real difference between these cakes is consistency and the ratios behind it. Firm suits a cluster; soft suits a colony that is moving.
Either cake works in either season — the consistency decides which suits, not the month. Made for bees wintering in a cold climate, and a long way from plain sugar.
The softer one, for the front of the season: DR. Gost Special Pollen Bee Cake.
Product Description
Usage
Place 1 piece on the frames of each hive, with one corner of the package opened.
Intended Use & Features (winter cake)
- Season
- suitable all year round, but its consistency is specially adjusted for the winter cluster.
- Feed type
- a complementary feed for bees — placed on the frames.
- Winter needs
- the vitamin, mineral and protein ratios are balanced for the winter cluster.
What it is called in the shops
In Sweden this type of product is usually sold as foderdeg med pollen or proteinfoder. We call ours a winter pollen cake. Note: it is not an invintringsfoder — that is sugar meant to be stored; this is protein laid on the cluster.
Content
Powdered sugar, pollen, enzymes, vitamins, protein.
Important Note (pollen function)
Pollen is the bees' protein source, and the need for it is greatest during brood build-up and going into winter. Contrary to popular belief, the cake does not cause egg-laying in winter. The difference from the summer cake is the consistency, along with the vitamin, mineral and protein ratios needed in winter.
Storage
Store in its original packaging, protected from sunlight.
Best before
24 months from the date of manufacture.
Warnings
Keep out of reach of children. Do not use if the security lock is broken or missing.
End of product description.
Storage and shelf life
- Keep out of reach of children.
- Store in the original packaging at 5–20 °C, protected from direct sunlight.
- Shelf life 24 months from the date of manufacture. The date is printed on the packaging.
Manufacturing and control
Manufacturer: Bolworm Bolgübsan, Bolu, Turkey
Approval number: α TR-1400083
Health certificate: 26-17-000450 — latest consignment
Approved feed establishment with the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry since 18 Feb 2021, under Law No. 5996 on Veterinary Services, Plant Health, Food and Feed. A new health certificate is issued by the General Directorate of Food and Control for every consignment — without it the goods may not leave the country.
- Exporter
- Gost Sağlık Arı ve Arıcılık Ürünleri, Çanakkale
- Official supervision
- The manufacturer is under regular inspection by the Ministry of Agriculture’s food inspectors. Export is permitted only if the consignment passes the check — our consignment list, naming every product and its lot number, is stamped as checked and signed by the inspector.
- Manufacturing
- The manufacturer declares that the products are made in accordance with current Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and applicable legislation.
- Import and Swedish supervision
- PMA Nordic AB is a registered feed business operator with the Swedish Board of Agriculture (SE67569098) and is therefore subject to Swedish feed control. The goods are customs-cleared into the EU with us as declarant.
- Origin
- Turkey
- In our own apiary
- We use the range in our own hives in Svinninge.
Printable product sheet
One A4, double-sided — Swedish on the front, English on the back. What it is, how to use it, dosage, storage and the numbers behind the product. Made to live in the box in the apiary, where you rarely have a signal.
How we think about supplements
No treatment — preparation. A supplement for bees is roughly what a multivitamin from the grocery shop is for us, not something you collect at the pharmacy. It fills gaps in the diet, no more and no less.
Think of the colony as a skilled cook. We set out flour, eggs and oil — then it cooks its own meal. One day that is an omelette for the protein, another day something that mostly gives energy. We do not choose the recipe; we make sure the ingredients are there. It shows in how they take: one hive finishes a tablet in a fortnight, another needs a month or more. Bees have managed this for millions of years.
And that is how the build-up holds together. The gut flora is where nutrition is absorbed; support it and the bees get more out of the same feed. The queen lays according to what the colony can feed — when the nutrition is inside, so is the signal.
A colony wants to grow. That is biology: bees build up and swarm when they can, and the limit is set by forage and flow, not by willingness. In Turkey beekeepers often split one hive into three or four in a season. In Svinninge one is hard work — the season is shorter and the flow smaller. That is the gap a supplement exists to fill.
Who developed the range
We import and sell the Dr. Gost range, and it is worth saying where it comes from, because provenance is a fact rather than a claim.
The range was developed and tested by Dr. Soner Güner, who holds a doctorate in beekeeping and has more than twenty years of research behind him. He is the author of Yeni Nesil Doğal Arıcılık — "New-Generation Natural Beekeeping" — described by its Turkish bookseller as the first written work in the country on the subject, and he runs a YouTube channel and an Instagram account of some eighteen thousand followers, both about bees and natural products. This is a range formulated by someone whose profession is the study of bees, not a white-label bought in and relabelled.
He works inside a tradition rather than alone. Turkey is the world’s second-largest honey producer by volume and third by number of hives — and the largest in Europe by a wide margin — on its own more than a third of the entire EU’s honey output, with some four times as many hives per inhabitant as the EU average. Beekeeping is taught there as a university degree with a state research institute behind it, and Anatolia holds five native subspecies of Apis mellifera.
The manufacturer’s own product information states that its active ingredients derive from university studies. Which university, and which studies, is something we have asked our supplier to document. Until that paperwork is in our hands, we report that sentence as theirs rather than as ours.
This is not a medicine. The product is not intended to prevent, treat or cure disease.
Common questions
- Does it leave any residue in the honey?
- No. The products leave no residue in honey or comb, so a colony that gets them still produces honey you can harvest and sell normally.
- Can I use it during the honey flow?
- Yes. Because nothing carries over into the honey, they can be used during the flow rather than only in the gaps between harvests.
- How often can it be used?
- They can be used continuously through the season and repeated season after season — there is no withdrawal period to plan around and no rotation requirement.
- How long does it keep, and how should it be stored?
- Each pack carries a recommended use-by date, generally 24 months from manufacture. Keep it in its original packaging between 5 and 20 °C, out of direct sunlight. The smell and any settling may change over time — that belongs to a naturally produced, fermented product.
- Can I return an opened product?
- No. For health and hygiene reasons, a product whose own vented plastic cap or inner packet has been opened cannot be returned (EU Consumer Rights Directive art. 16). The outer shipping box does not count — you may open the parcel and look at the goods. Products with their own seal intact can be returned within 14 days.
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- Jordbruksverket-registeredFeed business operator SE67569098
- Biodlarna StockholmStockholm Beekeepers Association
- Our own warehouseWe pack and post within Sweden
- NPA memberPackaging producer responsibility
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