How to Make Hummingbird Nectar

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Barbara Dewitt. I'm a National Wildlife Federation Stewart with The Broward County Audubon Society. You can make hummingbird nectar to supplement the plants that are in your yard with the tubular shaped flowers and the insects that are coming to your plants and flowers and the way to make the nectar is to put one quarter of sugar and four quarters or four parts of water. Put that in a pan and boil that until the sugar is all dissipated and then take that and put it in a feeder. A red feeder is good to put it in because hummingbirds are attracted to red or orange. And put that somewhere you can see it and where you can look at those hummingbirds as they come in to feed. You can also store some of that if you make more than one, enough for one feeder, you can store that in your refrigerator for up to two weeks. Also you'd want to keep your feeders, especially in South Florida, you want to keep them very clean so wash them out maybe every two or three days and since the hummingbird season here is between September and March, it'll be a little bit cooler for some of that time and you can wait longer to wash them out but you don't want to have any bacteria in there that the hummingbirds could ingest and might harm them. So that's to keep it very, very clean and the ports cleaned so they can go right in there and perch or even some of the feeders they don't even have perches, they can just flap their little wings and just feed in flight."