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This page last updated: May 17, 2007 Brown Sugar as a Hummingbird Food A More Complete Version Than You Probably Wanted to Know Sugar is sugar, right? Well, not exactly. It's true that most of the brown sugar we can buy nowadays is essentially refined white sugar (the "good stuff" for feeding hummingbirds) with a little molasses added to it, but it's those additions that make it less of a good choice for your hummingbird feeder. Let's not forget that hummingbird (or any wildlife) feeding is primarily a mechanism using "human" techniques to bring nature closer to our windows for our enjoyment. The safest way to do that is to provide "natural" food sources that the birds already are eating out in the wild. For finches or grosbeaks we could plant sunflower seeds and let them feed off the heads -- OR we could buy bags of sunflower seeds and place them in our feeders. For hummingbirds, we can provide flowers which contain the nectar they like to drink -- OR we can copy that nectar most closely by providing roughly a 4:1 solution (water:sucrose) in a hummingbird feeder. When we start messing with the contents of "sucrose" we can get into trouble. Refined table sugar -- the white granulated stuff -- is basically pure sucrose. I know that environmentally aware (some might say extremist) people will try to avoid anything refined, but in this case "raw" sugar isn't better. From the Recipe Zaar -- "Raw sugar is the residue left after sugarcane has been processed to remove molasses and refine the sugar crystals. With flavor similar to brown sugar, it should not be confused with brown sugar. Raw sugar contains molds and fibers which are considered nutrients, however, to be sold in the US raw sugar has been refined losing some of these properties. There are three popular types: Demerara sugar, a coarse-textured, dry, raw sugar from the Demerara area of Guyana; Turbinado sugar, a fine-textured moist raw sugar; and Barbados sugar, a raw sugar that has been steam cleaned." So what's in "Raw Sugar?" Demerara Sugar (raw, aka "Natural Brown
Sugar")
Is regular brown sugar any better? Vitamin & Mineral Content
in Brown Sugar¹ and Granulated Sugar per 100 g
¹ It's unclear exactly with "type" of brown sugar was used to garner these results. The mineral content comes from molasses -- and brown sugar varies in it's molasses content based on whether or not it's "light" (3.5 % molasses) versus "dark" (6.5% molasses) brown sugar. Not to confuse you, (but I did warn you that this would probably be more than you wanted to know...), Dr. Leo V. Curtin has produced a compilation giving quite a bit of information about molasses itself. The nutritional content of molasses varies greatly for a variety of processing and production reasons, but on average here are some of the accepted averages for components of molasses. I report those for molasses produced from cane sugar, since it's reportedly more widely used in the US due to it's better taste (as opposed to that from beet sugar and other sources):
Hummingbirds are apparently very sensitivity to dietary iron, with 400 ppm being the minimum lethal concentration (Bradley, et al., 2005). Hummingbirds apparently cannot secrete excess iron, and it builds up in their livers. This "iron storage disease" was implicated in the death of many hummingbirds at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson in 2002 when the iron content from commercially available hummingbird food had been unknowingly increased. Even wild hummingbirds have been found dead with liver iron concentrations well above 400 ppm (Bradley, et al., 2005). Are the wild hummingbirds getting this excess iron from feeders where folks are feeding brown sugar? Or is the iron content in tap water used to make artificial nectars too high? Or are there other reasons? The mystery remains unsolved as far as I know. Seems clear to me that if we are trying to emulate the natural contents of flower nectar for our birds, we don't need to be polluting the mix with potentially harmful and at best superfluous additives like molasses. We might also be a bit more careful about the water we use to mix our feeder nectars, especially if we live in a region with high iron concentrations. Citations Bradley, G., S. Dial, B, Glock, C. Martinez, and C. Reggiardo. 2005. Arizona Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Newsletter. Vol 10; Issue 1. online at: http://microvet.arizona.edu/AzVDL/newsletters/Apr05.pdf
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