Weedwacker, your mix is fine, but will be slightly more concentrated than 1:4. (It sounds like another good way to quickly make a sugar solution for a feeder.)
The reason? There is a difference between someone adding two cups of water to ½ cup of sugar and someone adding just enough water to ½ cup of sugar to end up with two cups of solution. The sugar exists, it takes up space.
To visualize: if you take a 2-cup container, add one cup of sugar to it, then start pouring one cup of water over the sugar, what happens? The water does not sit on top of the sugar to end up with two full cups. Some of the water will sink down into the dry sugar. However, the sugar will not absorb the full cup of water you are pouring. Once the sugar becomes waterlogged, the water level will rise above the level of the sugar. You end up with about 1½ cups total. This is the 1 part sugar to 1 part water concentrate Donna talks about in her article.
If you take this 1½ cups of 1:1 solution and add 3 cups of water to it, you will have a proper 1:4 solution with a total volume of 4½ cups.
On the other hand, if you take one cup of sugar and add just enough water to make 4 cups of solution, you still have one cup of sugar but it is dissolved in less water, because you end up with only 4 cups total instead of 4½ cups.
The difference between one cup of sugar in ~3½ cups of water versus one cup of sugar in 4 cups of water is not that big. The "ideal" 1:4 sugar to water ratio is recommended because1:4 is an approximate average sugar concentration of nectar from natural hummer plants. In other words, the nectar from some plants is somewhat more concentrated, while nectar from others is somewhat more dilute.
More importantly, if someone wants to use Donna's idea of storing a 1:1 concentrate in the freezer it will take 1½ parts of concentrate to 3 parts water to make a 1:4 solution.
If you only use 1 part concentrate to 3 parts water, you are cutting the sugar concentration by 1/3, which is likely significant to those hummers that use the feeder frequently.
I think Donna's idea of storing a sugar concentrate is a good one, and likely useful to many. I just wanted to reiterate Horntoad's point that 1 part concentrate to 3 parts water is not enough concentrate to make a 1:4 final solution.
