Candyboards revisited

Last year I placed candyboards on the hives  in case the bees needed extra food over the winter.A candy board is basically a layer of sugar placed above the frames, it's an idea I've seen in American blogs and means wherever the bees are in the hive there will be sugar directly above them. The bees shouldn't really need this extra food but I prefer to take a belt and braces approach just in case something goes wrong -such as the Winter being too mild and the active bees blazing through their stores too fast or the Winter dragging on for too long and the bees running out of food. It's cheaper to buy a few kilos of sugar you don't need than replacing a lost colony in Spring, and the unused sugar can be reused to make syrup later anyway.

The boards I use are just a thick wooden frame with a wire mesh to support what's essentially a huge sugar lump. Other designs I've seen have been more like a crown board with slightly deeper sides and the sugar stuck to the underside of the wooden board rather than supported by a mesh. I already had 3 empty boards from last year so just needed to make one more for the fourth hive.

Making a fourth candyboard

Using some more or less 40mm x 40mm wood cut at 45 degree angles then screwed and glued together with a small entrance drilled in one side and a wire mesh is inserted and stapled in place by the sides. My old Argos stapler seems to be dying a death after only 16 years use so I wound up banging the staples in with a hammer whilst listening to Therapy.

Last year I'd put about 5KG of sugar in each frame, given how little the bees had used this was obviously excessive. This year I decided to put just 3.75 kilos of sugar in each board, I could probably use less but need to make sure the sugar lump will support it's own weight as there's some flexibility in the wire mesh. Actually in hindsight I could probably put a rigid support across the middle but that'd probably make it a bit harder to pull out the unused sugar in Spring.

Mixing a few kilos of sugar with minimal amounts of water is more like mixing concrete than cooking and I snapped a spatula last time. This time I bought  a stainless steel gardening trowel to mix it with and used a huge food grade plastic bucket I'd acquired courtesy of my local Subway. Well I say it was from Subway but it could've been absolutely anyone dumping two large buckets of breadmix with the labels scratched down the side of their shop next to their bins the night before they were due to be emptied... Anyway after a thorough clean they're proving useful.

Stir it up

Empty boards lined with plastic wrap
-don't want to glue them the utility room floor

As well as sugar the bees need protein which they get from pollen. You can buy pollen that bees have collected but you can't give this to your bees in case it harbours viruses or other disease that won't affect the humans it's being marketed to. I added some Candipolline Gold Bee Feed which contains pollen that's been sterilised with Gamma radiation -yep beekeeping is so olde worlde... I put a small block of Candipolline in the middle of each board with plastic on the top and sides to keep it from the sugar but the bottom side open against the mesh so the bees can access it from below.

Candipolline Gold Bee Feed with Pollen

With the Candipolline in place I then added the wet sugar with the trowel and more or less smoothed it out. Hopefully I pressed it together enough for it to form a solid block when it's finally dry. If the bees do use this sugar they'll need to add water to it before they can use it, in theory there should be some condensation in the hive that they can use for this although I've also read that the huge sugar lump serves as a moisture sink helping to keep the hive dry -however it works it seemed to go well last last year anyway.

The filled Candy Boards will need a while to dry

The wooden frames I've made are deeper than they need to be so there's just over an inch of air gap at the top. The empty void will just make it harder for the bees to heat the hive so I decided to fill the gap with insulation. The gap was too narrow for a block of Kingspan so I decided to use layers of thin insulation (Selitac 5mm expanded polystyrene floor underlay) glued together and attached to a plywood square that would rest on the sugar. I used a plywood layer to stop the bees nibbling the insulation and reduce the chance of water condensing on the insulation's foil surface and dripping onto the sugar.

Emergency Rations for Hive4, just in case.

After a couple of weeks drying time I put the candy boards onto the hives with the Kingspan insulation on top and then the roof on top of that. It's been pretty mild so far although the temperature doesn't seem to affect food stores as you'd expect - general consensus seems to be that whilst colder weather uses more stored food to keep the bees warm warmer weather means more activity in the hive which also means more food used. Hopefully it won't be needed and I'll be dissolving the sugar to make 1:1 syrup in Spring.

Insulation on top, just needs the roof and they're done.