Fondant for Winter

Well after the other night's freeze it's warmed up a little and the pond has unfrozen for a while. Still too cold to give the bees anymore syrup though. Provided the bees have stored enough food for the winter they can now be left alone to eat it. If they have't got eough food stored yet you can still feed them. What I'm planning to do carry on feeding them untill they stop taking anymore food. It's too cold for syrup now, so it's time for some solid food. The solid food for bees is fondant. Yep, christmas cake icing.

It's easy enough to make: just 6 lb of sugar and 1 pint of water add a teaspoon of cream of tartar and boil till melted. It's quite nasty stuff if you get it on you as it sticks like glue and stay hot for a long time.

Making fondant. Don't get it on you.

Once melted you need to whisk it up to get some air into it. I popped it into my trusty food mixer, a handed down Kenwood machine that doesn't see much use. As the fondant gets more air in it and cools it becomes harder for the machine (or you) to whisk and before finishing my batch it burnt out the motor on my blender. Oops. I used a hand blender to finish the batch which seemed to do okay. I then spooned the white gunk into some cleaned takeaway food boxes.

It's not mashed potato.

The finished product looks a lot like mashed potato. I made these last month and left them in the fridge till they were needed. When I cut the space board insulation for the tops of the hives I made a hole for the fondant boxes to go in.

Dinner is served.

The fondant goes onto the crownboard over the feeding hole and a half depth of the insulation goes over that to keep the heat in. It's not airtight so some heatloss probably still occurs but the bees can glue it down round the edges if they feel the need.

Bees of Hive1 and Hive2 enjoying some nutritious candy.

The bees in Hive1 started eating their fondant from one end of the box, whereas those in Hive2 started from the middle which as they progressed gave them more surface area to nibble. Today I replaced the boxes with new ones and was able to see that whilst Hive2 only had a little fondant left from the the corners of the boxes whilst Hive1 had about a third left. When I checked them today I lit the smoker just in case but didn't smoke the hives -better to have the smoke avaiable if i needed it than not available if I needed it. The bees in Hive1 remained in their cluster whilst I removed the box and popped a new on in it's place, looking in the hole I could see them moving about a bit but they didn't seem in a hurry to come and meet me. I had set the smoker down nearer to Hive1 than 2 so it may have been that they managed to detect the smoke I guess. Hive2 was a different story, they were very active and I had to drop their new box on in a hurry as they started to come meet me. One managed to fly out before I got the box in place. There was about 8 or 9 dead bees outside the mouse guard of Hive1 which I flicked away from the entrance. I think they're probably dead bees that the colony pushed out, in the summer they'ed normally carry the dead bees out and drop them off away from the hive. During winter given the number of bees that do die off there's a good chance that dead bees dropping from the cluster to the floor can build up enough to block the entrance so it's good practice to get a wire and now and then poke it through the mouseguard holes to clear the way.