Is it normal bees are cute

TLFR: Some beekeepers in some parts of the world do feed their bees HFCS, but there are questions about how good this is for bees, and beekeepers with any scruples don't use it to directly increase honey production. I've never heard of HFCS making bees so fat they can't fly, but it can be harmful in other ways.

As far as bees are concerned, honey is fuel they store up over the summer in order to get them through the winter. Bees form a cluster inside the hive when the weather is cold, and the centre of that mass of bees is maintained at a temperature just a few degrees lower than our normal core body temperature (93°F/34°C). The way they do that is by eating honey and basically shivering: they disconnect their wings from the muscles that work them, and the heat generated by a few thousand tiny muscles quivering keeps the cluster warm .

The way most beekeepers work their hives is that, in the autumn, they take off much of the honey that the bees have produced over the summer, make an educated guess about how much honey the bees will need to have available over the winter, and then feed them sugar syrup which the bees then convert into honey (although it can't legally be called that, since the definition of honey is that it is something that's produced from flower nectar).

It is possible for unscrupulous beekeepers to feed their bees HFCS or some other sugar syrup, have them process it, and then extract and sell it as honey. Since the bees don't have to fly to collect nectar, the hive could produce massive quantities of this fake honey much more quickly than if they were making real honey. If the result was mixed with real honey, it would be very difficult for a consumer to know the difference; it would be pale and taste rather bland, but then most consumers have been trained by the big-brand honey companies to believe honey is naturally pretty bland. Analytical testing might be able to prove the honey is dubious, but using laboratory methods to detect fake or adulterated honey is notoriously difficult because real honey varies so much. Flower nectar is primarily fructose and glucose just like white sugar and HFCS, so in chemical terms the fake honey wouldn't be much different from real honey; it would just contain lower levels of the trace compounds that are in nectar and concentrated by the bees during honey production.

I live in Britain, and HFCS isn't easily available to consumers or beekeepers here. It is cheaper than white sugar from cane or beets in the USA because of the subsidies paid to corn farmers by the US government, and this price difference makes it attractive to large-scale beekeepers. It's also easier to handle: rather than having to dissolve large quantities of white sugar in water to make a syrup to feed the bees, it can be just poured directly into the feeders.

However, the process used to produce HFCS creates an enzyme which is harmful (or even fatal) to bees. There have been cases of beekeepers losing large numbers of colonies after they fed HFCS with unusually high levels of this enzyme, and there are questions about subtle, long-term effects on the health of the hive. I understand from reading US beekeeping forums that at least some beekeepers there stick to the time-tested method and only feed their bees syrup made from white sugar.

As far as obese bees are concerned, this just doesn't happen. Like all insects, bees do have "fat bodies": internal tissues which store fat for use when food is short. These are very small in the bees that are born in the spring and summer, forage for nectar and pollen for a couple of weeks and then die. The fat bodies are much larger in the bees that are produced later in the year and will have to survive through the winter months, but they're never so big that they prevent the bee from flying, and I've never heard of winter bees having a shorter foraging range.

Lol...your're not funny

Like you

I like bees too. I'm thinking of trying bee keeping next year. There was a really cool hive in a tree in the woods behind my house last year but the tree fell over Last fall and they all abandoned ship.