Feeding Hummingbirds in Freezing Weather: Keeping Nectar Warm, DIY

For those of you whose hummingbirds arrive in cold weather, or if your hummers stay year round and you have occasional sub-freezing weather, we’ve found some brilliant DIY feeder warmers.

Some of these warmers are brilliantly simple while others require bit of handyman-ish knowledge. All are very inventive. We recommend that you don’t start watching these videos 5 minutes before you have to go somewhere because one video always leads to another. Before you know it, it’s dark out, you’ve bought 2 advertised gadgets, and you’re watching funny cat videos.

Our favorite:

We think this particular system worked very well. Maybe it was the awesome video that made it our favorite. During a very cold spell in AZ, Patrick helped his Anna’s Hummingbirds with a heating pad and a hair dryer! And his hummers sat there! It’s a great video…

We’ve yet to try out any of the DIY warmers but will definitely be trying a couple of them this Spring. We’ll take videos and report back. ANY of them will be better than switching out cold with warmed feeders every half hour. Been there and done that. Good thing we’re self-unemployed.

Here’s one of the particularly inventive ones. Maybe a rain hood might be a helpful addition to protect the heater & thermostatically controlled outlet.


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A hummingbird flying near a feeder with water.

1 Comment

  1. Sue Darst on February 22, 2019 at 1:36 pm

    I love my feeder, it is very durable and my birds love all the holes to feed from, best money I ever spent and I have purchased several feeders