Instead, you can place a block of candy or bakers fondant (available in supermarkets) over the feed hole. If it does, DON’T feed with more syrup, as the excess moisture can easily cause dysentery/nosema in weak colonies. Lift your hive and get to know its weight when stores are plentiful so that you can take action if it you feel it weighing a lot less during winter. It is best to feed the bees in the evening, so that darkness will help quell the excitement, and to feed all your colonies at the same time, as this will help to reduce the likelihood of robbing.
And if you are still not sure you can do what I do – feed syrup until they stop taking it down, on the premise that the bees know best.
Winterizing bee hives full#
brood frame, full on both sides, has about 5lb of honey, and that Ted Hooper recommends 40-45lb of stores, you should be able to work out how much syrup is needed. How much syrup do we have to feed? Well, this will be different for each colony so first of all open up each hive and assess its stores by eye and then decide. It is very important to pour a small amount of syrup down the feed hole in the crown board so that the bees know it is there, as sugar syrup has no smell that the bees can recognise.
There are various types of feeders for doing this (check suppliers catalogues). The bees should be fed with sugar syrup (mix 2lb of sugar with 1 pint of hot water) about the 1st or 2nd week of September. The old adage that ‘bees never freeze to death, they only starve to death’, is very true, so it is vitally important that we provide sufficient stores for them to last until spring. And the more bees emerging at this time of the year the better as it will be the surviving bees that will resume foraging and house bees duties in the spring. It goes without saying that a YOUNG QUEEN is less likely to die or become a drone breeder, but more importantly, the younger the queen is, the later in the season she will lay, which means more bees that don’t have to live as long under winter conditions. Is that all, you ask? Well, it sounds a lot but there are practical steps the beekeeper can take to help the bees through the winter. The bees should be in a sound, waterproof hive so that they are dry, preferably on stands with good air circulation around them, and, situated in a dry, warm, unexposed apiary.
Winterizing bee hives free#
It should be disease free and protected from pests and predators, andĤ. Stores should be sufficient to last until the spring flowers arrive,ģ. The colony should have a young queen and plenty of beesĢ. The optimum condition for a colony going into winter is:ġ.
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