Hummingbird Feeder With 3 mm Bee Guards

Wasps find sugar water in about a day. Then they sit on the ports, the hummingbirds hang back in the shrub waiting for a gap, and within a week your hummingbird feeder is a wasp feeder.

This one narrows the opening to 3 mm. That is the whole idea, and the number is the point: a hummingbird’s bill is a needle and slides straight through, while blunter mouthparts stop at the plastic. The nectar sits below the guard rather than at the top of an open hole, so there is nothing at the surface to land on. Five yellow flower ports, each one built that way. It will not empty your garden of wasps — nothing hanging outdoors full of sugar does that — but it takes away the easy meal, and that is usually enough to hand the hummingbird feeder back to the birds.

Ants come at it from the other direction, down the hanging line, and get a different answer: a small red cup that you fill with water and hang above the hummingbird feeder on one of the two S-hooks in the box. They reach the water and stop. Keep it topped up — on a hot week the water goes before the nectar does, and an empty moat is decoration.

Underneath, the base widens into a scalloped tray that runs right round the hummingbird feeder, which is where the birds actually sit. A perched hummingbird stays four or five times longer than a hovering one, so a hummingbird feeder with a tray is the difference between a blur past the window and something you get to watch.

The bottle is faceted red glass, 14 fl oz, on a base 5.5 inches across, and the whole hummingbird feeder stands 9.84 inches tall. Fourteen ounces is deliberately not much: nectar sours in warm weather within a few days, and a smaller batch is a fresher one. If you already have a crowd of birds, expect to fill this every couple of days in high summer.

Two honest notes before you buy. The base of this hummingbird feeder is not dishwasher safe — wash it by hand, in hot water, and the wide mouth on the bottle means a bottle brush reaches everything without a fight. And the moat screws onto its long hook, which on some units takes a couple of goes to line up and tighten. Neither is a fault you would return it over, but you should hear both from us rather than find them out.

Fill it, screw the base on, turn it over and hang the hummingbird feeder from the wire handle — a tree hook, a deck hook, a shepherd’s hook. Somewhere with clear air around it and a window you sit at.

• Fourteen Ounces
• Five Ports, Each One 3 mm Across
• Wide Mouth, Warm Water, Done
• It Comes With The Bits You Need