Hummingbird Nectar Recipe: The best homemade recipe
Do you know that the North American hummingbirds flap their wings at an average speed of 53 beats per second? Thus they need more and more calories to maintain a balanced burn rate. Moreover, the tiny birds have a fast metabolism which further deepens the need to eat more often.
The hummingbirds visit up to 2000 flowers daily to meet their caloric needs which is a ton of work. You can help reduce this amount of work with a simple hummingbird nectar recipe. To survive, a hummingbird needs to eat every 10 to 15 minutes.
In this article, we will help you learn about the perfect hummingbird nectar recipe.
Contents
How to Make Hummingbird Food
The best help one can provide to these tiny birds is by supplying them with all-important nectar. There are wide varieties of hummingbird nectar available in the market. Still, the best option is to make it at home with our easy hummingbird nectar recipe.
You do not need anything extra to make this. The ingredients required for nectar preparation are available at almost every home. So, without waiting any further, let’s try this super easy recipe to make sweet nectar.
The Best Hummingbird Nectar Recipe
Ingredients
- Refined White Sugar, aka Table Sugar. You need one part of sugar.
- Water. You need four parts of water.
You will need a measuring spoon, a bowl, and a spoon or a beater to mix these ingredients.
Instructions
Once you are done collecting ingredients and utensils from the kitchen, you need to follow these simple directions to make the DIY nectar.
- Take one cup of sugar and put it in the bowl.
- Take four cups of water and add it to a boil.
- Stir the liquid with a spoon or a beater until sugar is fully dissolved.
- Fill the hummingbird feeder and wait for the cute little birds to come to suckle the nectar up.
- Store the remaining nectar in the refrigerator.
Notes
Important Instruction
Don’t use any substitute for refined sugar like honey. It will enhance the growth of dangerous fungi. Moreover, don’t use red food color to attract more hummingbirds. There is no available evidence that the color red can attract more birds. If you still need a red color, you can always choose a bird feeder with red color on it.Why make DIY hummingbird food?
There are several reasons to make the hummingbird nectar at home. It is
- Cheap
- Easy
- Convenient.
Following this Hummingbird nectar recipe, you can make hummingbird nectar at home that will make you more attached to nature and birds in particular. Moreover, the children will love to add a helping hand and learn from you. It will teach them to value nature along with its inhabitants.
How long can I store extra sugar water in the fridge?
You can store it for more than two weeks in your fridge. It is just sweet water made by mixing water and sugar. It doesn’t go sour easily. It does not require any special care as well.
Just look out for any molds. If you find one, discard it and make another batch to keep your supply of the nectar constant.
Best hummingbird feeders
When buying a hummingbird feeder, look for the following qualities.
- It should be well built and strong.
- It should be easy to wash and refill.
- It should be easy to hang.
- Value for the price.
A good feeder should meet these qualities or most of these. Here are some of the best hummingbird feeders available in the market, and you can purchase them from amazon.
- Nature’s Rhythm Bird Feeder (Antique design. 28 oz capacity with five feeding platforms and red color)
- Hummingbird Feeder (available in sets of two. Easy to refill with ten feeding platforms and transparent color)
- Juegoal Glass Hummingbird Feeder (26 oz capacity with five feeding platforms and metal hanging handle and red color)
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no harm in using tap water for making the hummingbird nectar. However, be sure that the groundwater is safe for consumption. You can boil it if you are extra conscious about the health of hummingbirds. It will remove any impurities.
Keep it simple and use only refined white sugar or regular table sugar for the hummingbird nectar recipe. Use of honey, raw sugar, corn syrup, powdered sugar, confectioner’s sugar, or artificial sweetener is not recommended.
It is not necessary to boil water to make hummingbird nectar. However, boiling can improve water quality by removing impurities and killing microorganisms. So, if you have plenty of time and want to keep it extra pure, you can opt for boiling the water.
A part is not a universal measuring unit. It can be anything, a cup, a spoon, a bowl, a bucket, or anything else that can hold something.
Before going any further, you have to choose the tools you want to use for measuring. Let’s say you choose a cup. So, one cup will be one part. Multiply it with four, and you have your four parts.
For example:
1 cup = 1 part
1 cup × 4 = 4 parts
You will need 1 cup of sugar and 4 cups of water for the recipe. You can make it as large or small as you want.
Birds usually eat natural food out in the wilderness. We should keep our feeding as close to natural as possible. Although red dye has no proven side effects, it is still a chemical. Adding red dye will expose hummingbirds to harmful effects of the chemical.
It is from one to four. Every part of sugar needs four parts of water to make hummingbird nectar. For example, if you have one cup of sugar and you want to make a perfect sweet water syrup, you will need four cups of water for that. Anything you use for measuring sugar, you need it four times for water.
To make a smaller batch of hummingbird nectar, you need to keep the ingredients in smaller quantities. Let’s say you want to use only 2 cups of water. How much sugar will you need? We know that water should be four parts for hummingbird nectar. 2 cups divided by four will give us the value of 1 part.
So,
2 / 4 = 0.5 or ½
You will need half a cup of sugar for 2 cups of water to make perfect hummingbird nectar.
The best liquid to put in a hummingbird feeder is simple sugar water. Many fancy options are available in the market, but simple is best. Just grab a cup of sugar and four cups of water. Mix it well and have your best liquid for the hummingbird feeder.
Fill your feeders and hang them in the garden for visiting hummingbirds. They will be happy to return to your garden as often as possible.
You can help hummingbirds by:
Planting native plants
Providing them shelter, food, and nesting habitat.
Keep your bird feeders clean so they won’t get sick due to mold.
Don’t use pesticides in your garden, or birds will not be likely to visit it.
Keep your cat indoors so she can’t scare the hummingbird.
Add a water source in the garden and keep hummingbirds safe from colliding with windows.
These are the things that help hummingbirds.
The hummingbirds like nectar, and they like a lot of it. Naturally, they are attracted to flowers that produce loads of nectar-like trumpet honeysuckle, weigela, salvias, bee balm, and bleeding heart. Flowers that are red in color and tubular in shape are most popular among hummingbirds.
Place the bird feeders under shade away from a lot of activity. Placing your hummingbird feeders near trees can make them more likable.
Changing sugar water and clean hummingbird feeders every other day is best. However, if you are busy and can’t do it every other day, you must do it twice a week in summer and once in winter. If you witness mold growing around the water, it is recommended to replace the water and clean the feeder immediately.
Final Words?
Hummingbirds are very sweet and beautiful creatures. We must help these little birds find their favorite food, the nectar. If you are looking to attract more hummingbirds to your garden, try planting native plants and flowers that produce lots of nectar. Place your bird feeders in a shady spot near trees.
So, take some time from your busy schedule and make some sweet water with this extremely easy hummingbird nectar recipe and fill your feeders for hummingbirds.
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