This sort of practice is seen as controversial amongst the general public; my experience with selling to people, is that feeding the bees sugar is a primary concern.
I'm not sure why feeding bees sugar is deemed controversial. It is a fact that bees are unable to receive the required nutrients from sugar, but would the bee's health and well-being suffer if they've been fed a small amount of sugar after a honey extraction, which would happen a few times a year?
If the bees are fed sugar, I believe they can then make honey out of it. Does this create an inferior honey product, compared to if the bees created honey from nectar? Is this the main concern of the general public when they ask whether the bees was fed sugar? Is this a risk even if the sugar has had water added to it, turning it into a paste?
Do any of you guys actually feed sugar to your bees after an extraction, or do you just leave sugar feeding when the bees might potentially starve otherwise? I believe it's popular to feed sugar paste to a split, or captured swarm in a nuc, as they can use the sugar to build wax. Might this practice be good also when going to provide a new super for a preexisting established hive, which has frames that hasn't been drawn out yet?
I'm also interested in good methods in actually feeding sugar paste. I see that there's many ideas and approaches, but a lot of them involve using an alternative lid, with a hole on the top with a bottle that slowly drips sugar paste down to the bees. I don't check my bees regularly and have a limited supply of lids, so I'm apprehensive of doing this. In the past, I've added sugar paste to cup cake sachets, and I've placed these on the bee mate inside the hive. It seemed to work but it was inefficient as the cup cake sachets could only contain a small amount of sugar paste (as it had to have a shallow amount to prevent bees from drowning).