As the weather cools it's time to ensure the bees have enough food stored for winter. There's a variety of feeder types out there but I prefer to use large bulk feeders you can leave on the hives and top up without disturbing the bees. I only had two Adams Feeders here and as I've increased the number of hives a lot and have an out apiary I needed some more feeders. As I need to lug them to an out apiary I decided to go with
Polystyrene feeders as I figure they'll be a little lighter to carry and the cost of painting them will be less the varnish I'd buy for sealing wooden -plus I'd not have to wait for the varnish to outgas before slapping them on my hives. I ordered four of them from Paynes Southdown Bee Farms.
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| Polystyrene National Feeders |
They're made from pretty dense expanded polystyrene so should last a long time, however they do need painting inside to stop the syrup working it's way between the polystyrene beads and painting on the outside because ultraviolet light will damage them -yep they need protecting from sunlight. The transparent acrylic piece in the middle limits the bees access to the syrup chambers to prevent drowning and the chambers themselves have sloped floors towards the centre so every last drop will be available to the bees.
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| The Polystyrene National Feeder doesn't fit under a wooden National roof. |
Following advice from the forums I started painting the insides white
with water based gloss paint. Whilst painting it occurred to me that
these feeders actually seemed a bit on the large side compared to all my
other kit. I grabbed a spare hive roof and tried to sit the feeder in it, as it would be if it was on a hive. It didn't fit. Paynes website does actually say "This feeder has been designed to work in conjunction with our poly national roof." However it doesn't say anywhere that despite being called "National" it does not actually conform to British National Hive specification which is published by the British Standards Institution (British Standard 1300:1960 which if you want to look at is described in the
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's Advisory Leaflet 367). The specification gives an outside edge of 16 1/4" for components which are to fit under a roof with an 18 3/4" roof. This means the feeder does not work with the wooden National Roofs used by almost every beekeeper in the country. Looking at their Polystyrene Brood Boxes and Supers they do actually
state they won't fit under a wooden roof so I'm not sure why this was
omitted on the page for the feeders. I emailed Paynes suggesting they mention this on their page but they've not responded or updated their page which I'm guessing means they're not really bothered... so colour me slightly unimpressed there.
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| Cut down to something approaching National Specification |
I needed to get the feeders on the hives asap and I'd already started to paint them anyway so I couldn't really be messing about returning them and getting new ones so I decided to cut them to size. The reason they won't fit under a National roof is the extra mass added on the sides and the top presumably because even expanded polystyrene as dense as this is weaker than wood. I figure that unlike a super or brood box the only weight these will be supporting is a roof and a brick so they'll probably be fine trimmed down. Initially I used a hot wire foam cutter clamped in my workbench but with the polystyrene being so dense it kept snapping the hot wire, I even used some spare mandolin strings as they were thicker but they snapped a lot too. After trimming about four and a half edges the cutter stopped working completely so after taking that back I bought a fine toothed floorboard saw and finished the job with that. The hot wire gave a much better edge but the saw was far faster.
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| Sand in my paint |
After making sure each feeder would fit under my roof I resumed painting. I sealed the reservoir insides with 4 coats of paint. I gave the bit in the middle which the bees are going to be walking on a coat of sharp sand mixed with paint then
another couple of coats without sand over that. The uneven
surface created by the sand should give the bees something to grip on and reduce drownings. The outside got a few coats of
Sandtex Masonry Paint which is also water based. It only took one and a half test pots. I opted for Olive Green to match most of my kit but I'm sure the bees won't care. With all the painting done I had another look at the acrylic inserts. They were a very snug fit in their slots and I felt they would probably cut into the paint so using a Dremmel I trimmed the length a little and smoothed off the edges and rounded the corners.
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| Modified but finally ready Polystyrene Feeders |
With the feeders ready and my existing wooden feeders given a clean I was ready to pop them onto the hives and start feeding. All I needed was some syrup. For winter feed the syrup is made up of 2KG of sugar to 630ml of water bees which is about 2 pounds of sugar to 1 pint of water in olde worlde measurements. This year
the price of sugar has dropped dramatically, apparently due to a massive crop in Brazil and the Brazillian Real dropping in value so it was cheaper for me to buy it retail at 49-45p a kilo than trade. September saw me wheeling a trolley full of sugar up Newland Avenue from Herons to the car. I also popped to Farm Foods and B&M to load up.
Last year one of my colonies came out of winter with Nosema and had to be treated and another local beekeeper who knows more about bees than me said he'd lost 5 colonies to Nosema over the winter. To hopefully avoid or at least reduce that I decided to treat the syrup with oxalic acid. Beekeepers call it Thymolated Syrup ('thymolated' relating to Thyme Oil). The recipe is over in the
Beekeeping Forum. Basically you make a solution of Oxalic Acid and add it to the syrup. The recipe calls for 30g of Oxalic Acid Dihydride to be dissolved in 150ml of isopropyl alcohol. Some people use rubbing alcohol or surgical spirit one chap said he used vodka. I opted for vodka too as it's food safe unlike rubbing alcohol so may be slightly better for the bees -the alcohol will be evaporated off when it's used but rubbing alcohol contains other ingredients to make it less palatable which I suspect may be left behind in the final syrup albeit in small quantities.
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| Making up the oxalic acid solution |
I alredy had the Oxalic Acid Dihydride and popped to Sainsburys for the Vodka, got the cheapest they had. Sainsbury's say "
We aim for our stores to be at the heart of the community they serve." The one near me is open 24 hours. Got to be said that if the heart of this community is a 24 hour off licence and tobbacconist I'd be a little concerned about the state of it's lungs and liver. The vodka was 37.5% and I measured it into a jar with a syringe then placing the jar on a scale added the crystals, gave it a shake and left it in a warm water bath to dissolve. When I made another batch later I used some even cheaper 22% Vodka from an off licence on Newland Avenue and that seemed to work fine as well. I labelled up the jar with the warning symbols on the Oxalic Acid crystals' packet, the recipe, directions and a skull and crossbones as I don't really want anyone drinking it. In the forum post the author says to make thymolated syrup add 5ml of the solution per gallon of syrup or if it's just to stop the syrup fermenting add 5ml per 3 gallons of syrup.
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| Cooking. |
Previously I'd made syrup in a big pan, it was slow and took lots of
stirring. With so many hives to feed I needed a different approach and
instead used my Burco Boiler and a paint stirrer stuck in a drill. Took very little time. You do need to be careful with hot syrup though as it stays hot for a long time and is really sticky so there's a lot of scope for nasty accidents. I found that local wasps were pretty interested in what I was doing as well and kept landing on the boiler. I over filled my 18 litre boiler twice and made more than enough syrup to fill all my feeders. I added the oxalic acid solution whilst it was still hot and gave it a god stir with the drill. With the solution added the syrup slightly changed colour and opacity.
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| For the ladies I recommend the Thymolated 2:1 Syrup. |
Putting the feeders on the hives and filling them with syrup it wasn't long before the bees were filling up and taking it down into the brood boxes. I think they took the first 2 gallons in just 2 or three days. I've got bulk feeders on 6 hives and the moment and the last has a couple of contact feeders which I'm refilling at the moment.
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| Looks like a tiny leaky in the wood |
This afternoon I noticed a little congregation on the outside of one of my wooden feeders.I popped on my jacket and veil and went to investigate. They were quite intent on one particular point on the feeder wall. It looks like there's a very tiny leak through a knot hole so I'll be having a closer look at that feeder once the bees are finished with it. The polystyrene hives were quite a pain to resize but they work very well. When I've been to refill them I'm finding the reserviours completely dry thanks to their sloping floors, and I gather that if they're used with their corresponding polystyrene roofs they can be used as winter insulation -although they need a strap to hold them in place. However in the meantime I'll be sticking to wooden components in the main.
