I always had this confusion about feeding bees.
In my home setup, I have 3 hives in my backyard dependent on the acacia trees and a few scattered domestic coconut/mango trees.
In any season I’m not confident whether the hives will survive or progress without a supplement feeding
I was also told that even if the hives are migrated to any pollen/nectar bearing crops, I’m still supposed to feed them alteast once in 2 weeks, to collect honey .
Very close to where I live, there are is a couple who are into honey business and they do migrate with over 200 boxes to crop fields depending on the season and crop.
If I do not intend to migrate to crop fields, how often should I feed the hives?
Is it practical to have hives in your backyard apart from the personal intrest?
If at all I need to supplement the feed, ..
How often in summer/rainy/winter?
How often if a hive goes weak?
how often if I need to accelerate a moderately strong hive?
Hi Usha, there isn’t a straight simple answer to your question, so I’m going to try to give you some general input that might help fill in the picture for you.
Don’t worry - your bees aren’t only foraging in your yard, they can go anywhere up to 3, some say 5 miles away to find food. You can get an idea of what else they have access to when you walk or drive around your area, and by watching the entrance to see the colors of the pollen they’re bringing in. Somewhere on this forum a nice pollen color chart has been posted - I’ll find it and add it to this thread for you.
Migrating hives for pollination is a very different manner of beekeeping, and though I know only a little about it I don’t think it’s a useful model to compare to backyard beekeeping. It will make more sense for you to get familiar with seasonal patterns of blooming, warm and cold spells, wet and dry spells, and any other weather that influences foraging where you live. Your bees are aware of these patterns and behave accordingly. Beekeepers where there’s a cold, snowy winter and no forage for 3-4 months a year, like me, often feed during these months. The need to feed depends on reasons that are individual to each colony, within that particular winter. So when you get used to the ebb and flow of your region’s nectar and pollen sources and its weather cycles, you’ll factor those in as you monitor your colonies’ health and progress.
My sense here is that you might be misunderstanding the amount of control we have as beekeepers over what our bees will do 
Of course you can help (or hurt) a colony’s strength, but remember they are responding to seasonal and weather cues all the time. This means that if they don’t feel it’s the right time to increase population, they won’t. And that’s what is best for their health.
Hi Eva
How well written ! This is my first year and had great expectations about “honey”. Now I think instead of “honey” I have more “understanding”.
Yet that question remains ..
Should I supplement the feeding ? I see that the sugar feed vanishes the next day.
Thank you
Hahaha yes - I got three seasons of understanding before I got any honey 
And rightly so.
As long as that’s the case, keep feeding 
. When you see they aren’t taking it, you can bet that there’s enough forage out there.
In these 9 months, I did not see them reluctant to “Sugar” 
There have been several occassions where the frames have been full and I was tempted to add a “Super”. My trainer instead told me to increase the feeding and keep merging the frames into the weaker hive.
Only when one of the hives went down to a Queen + countable bees, I saw that my sugar feed was feasted on by “Ants”.
I’m yet to cross many milestones. And I see “florea” species also flocking in my backyard every mango season.
Well it’s good you have a trainer, since I sure don’t know anything about beekeeping your climate! I do want to share tho that if you are feeding, don’t super because they’ll just be putting sugar water in there 
Keep at it, and you’ll pass those milestones