Open feeding is now promoted in the BBKA news.

[Justabeekeeper]

Page 43 of the BBKA news this month seems to advocate open feeding of honeybees.
Got to be one of the stupidest things I've read in that magazine.

[AdamD]

This has been mentiponed on another thread as well. (Not seen the magazine yet so I don't know what is being suggested exactly).

There are two concerns I guess, 1) disease transmission and 2) robbing.

1) It's possible for disease/varroa to be transferred from bee to bee, with many bees at the same food source.

2) As for robbing, I have seen it when I have accidentally left something sticky outside and near a few hives, (or leaving the bee shed door open is a good one), that there will be a lot of activity around the entrances of all the hives in the apiary as bees search for food (at a short distance the round dance does not give enough information for the location of the food source, so the bees search anywhere until they find something). So it is possible that a weak hive could be robbed - especially at certain times of the year when there's not much food about and there's a lot of bees.

So my own conclusion is that there could be an issue, but fairly unlikely.

[NigelP]

Agree Adam extremely unlikely and particularly in Spring, which is the time the writer is advocating.
As I mentioned in the other thread open feeding of sugar solutions and pollen subs are practiced by many other countries who report little or no effect on robbing (the one proviso being that open feed needs to be situated at a distance from the hives...at least 30 ft as a well know American bee farmer said in ABJ a few years ago. However these practices are widely condemned in the UK, wrongly in my experience of doing this both deliberately and accidentally. The context really should be the time of year that open feeding will work and when it perhaps isn't a good time to do it.

I've never seen robbing be caused by accidentally leaving a wet super or three out....lots of frenetic bee activity as they eventually all locate source of nearby nectar. I think many beekeepers associate the initial frenetic activity of the bees with a nearby nectar source as robbing, which it isn't.
If robbing is going to occur it will happen even if no open nectar sources are available. But ho hum....the mind set is really really set in most UK beekeepers.

[Alfred]

I've accidentally left out a stores frame and within 5mins could not get near it for being pelted.
It was a violent frenzy that left the comb ragged.
In effect a robbing.
Not worth the risk for me now even in springtime.
The bbka hasn't condoned it because there is a note from the editor distancing them from opinions they print

[AdamD]

Odd to see it in print though. Now I've read it.
And there was no mention that the practice could be particularly 'problematical' at different times of the year.