Feeding Time

Every October  the fair rolls into town bringing traffic jams, diesel fumes, dodgy burgers and cold weather. A week later and it rolls away leaving the city with a little more litter, lighter pockets and possibly a lingering stomach ache. The arrival of the fair roughly marks the end of the beekeeping season. The honey crop has been harvested and feeding is more or less finished for most of the country. Looking back over the blog my winter feeding is usually done in October.

We've had a strange September and start to October with unseasonally warm temperatures. The spider population appears to be booming with big fat round spiders all over the place and ladybird larvae months after they should've metamorphosed. This month I spotted a Grey Dagger Moth caterpillar, I'd thought caterpillars were more of a summer thing but according to the Internet these caterpillars don't make a chrysalis till November so whilst it's still warmer than last year perhaps the weather is slowly returning to schedule.

Grey Dagger Moth Caterpillar. Looks like a child coloured it in.

I'm not sure how it got there but I found that garish little critter on my glove, so I'd assume there's a few more of the lurking around the garden. Anyway on to feeding. Last winter I'd put candyboards on the hives in case they needed emergency food. I think it'd worked quite well and the sugar that was left I removed and later used to make syrup. When that was used up I popped out to get some more sugar.

I went to Booker's because they previously gave beekeepers a discount on sugar but that doesn't appear to be the case this year. As they're a wholesaler it's still cheaper than high street supermarkets. Whilst most of the sugar is in the baking section near the barrels of oil and gallon bottles of vinegar the cheapest sugar was tucked away with the tea bags. I think it worked out as just over 69p a kilo in the end. I later saw a post in the forums saying B&M had some at 50p a kilo, but they'll only sell you six bags at a time.

The thick winter syrup is referred to as '2:1 syrup' but that's based on imperial measurements in which it was 2 pounds of sugar to 1 pint of water. The UK's old Imperial measurements are basically a confusing mess of names and numbers with 16 Ounces to a Pound, 14 Pounds to a Stone and 160 Stone to a Ton, and for volume 4 Gills to a Pint, 2 Pints to a Quart, 4 Quarts to a Gallon, 2 Gallons to a Peck, 4 Pecks to a Bushel and 64 Bushels to a Quarter. 2048 Quarts to a Quarter? Confused yet? Surprisingly these old measurements still linger, examples being pound jars, pint glasses and land measured in rods and acres. Under the metric system 2:1 syrup is actually 1KG of sugar to 630ml of water.

Grubs up! It's Syrup. Again.

It takes a long time to dissolve the sugar in so little water, a little heat helps but if you heat it too much and the sugar caramelises it can release toxins damaging to the bees. I tend to give it a few hours to dissolve and only heat it whilst I'm stirring it to avoid that. If you're making a large bath once the liquid is warm it retains heat for quite a while anyway. I think the pan I use is a 19 litre saucepan -that's just over 4 gallons in olde worlde units. Whilst it was warmer I was feeding the bees using Contact Feeders -an upside down bucket with a fine gauze section in the lid bees can suck syrup through. However when it gets colder these can leak so I swapped over to Adam's Feeders on hive 1 and 2 and Rapid Feeders on hives 3 and 4. Both feeders work in the the same way. They have a reservoir of liquid accessed via an island in the middle which has a hole down the centre, a cup type dome placed over the island limits access to the liquid and stops your bees drowning in it.

Full Rapid Feeder, with the lid on.

The bees climb onto the island through the hole in it and drink their way down. Hive4 was able to empty a contact feeder in about 2 days.

Empty Rapid Feeder, 2 days later.

The Adam's Feeders are the essentially the same but far bigger having the same footprint as a Super or Brood Box, they're also made of wood. A solid crown board goes over the feeder then the hive roof. I filmed a short clip of bees taking syrup in an Adam's Feeder on Hive2. The bigger feeder makes things easier for the beekeeper as it means less time having to top it up. On the other hand mould in the feeder can occasionally be a problem which is a bigger pain with a bigger feeder.

Bees taking syrup in an Adam's Feeder

As well as the syrup I'm giving the bees they already had a lot of stored honey in the brood boxes. I'd actually tied bruising the comb to get them to move it up into the Supers for me to extract but they seem to have moved it sideways in the boxes instead. The bees are still quite busy foraging at the moment too.

Busy bees at the entrance to Hive4 on 11/10/14

I'm still not convinced the Queen in in Hive4 has successfully mated, but it's a bit late to be doing invasive hive inspections. I've had a quick look at a couple of frames from the middle of the hive and not seen any eggs, however given the recent temperatures and fact the workers are packing away lots of syrup in there even if she is mated she may not be laying at the moment. The bees seem very placid and they're bringing in pollen which may bode well. All four colonies are looking pretty strong at the moment so I'm going to cross my fingers and hope for the best rather than dequeen them and unite the workers with another colony.

As winter draws closer..

Been a while since my last entry. Fact is as the temperature drops and winter approaches there's less  for the beekeeper to do. The bees give up the urge to swarm, in theory anyway, and things start to calm down for the winter, so now there's no more need to open up the hive and check every frame for a few months. Ideally having made a shedload of honey the bees should be all set for a winter of happpily eating honey and staying warm. However what happens to honeybees in hives is some bloke comes along and steals most f the honey they've made. Oh dear. Hard life for a honeybee.

Luckily beekeepers are bright enough to know to feed the bees up for winter. What we feed them is syrup. The syrup is made from ordinary granulated sugar the sort you'd buy from Tesco for the coffee club at work -or if you're a bit thrifty from Wilkinsons who sell the same stuff for a little less.

The syrup for winter is thicker than the syrup given in the spring and the recipe varies depending who you ask. some will tell you it's 2KG of sugear to 1 litre of water, others will say it's 2 lb of sugar to 1 pint of water, and about umpteen other slight variations on a more or less 2:1 theme. To make it you just get a humongous pan, measure out the sugar and water then heat it up till it's melted then wait around whilst it cools.

One pan of winter syrup.
(Possibly not the most exciting picture ever placed on the internet.)

The syrup then goes into a feeder of some description. There's a lot of different feeder types. Ask a handfull of beekeepers about the merits and shortcomings of the different types and they'll all quite happily give you conflicting information all the while insisting they're right and nobody else knows what they're talking about. Beekeepers are like that.

Aaaaaaaanyway the feeders I've opted to use are called Brother Adam Feeders. You're probably thinking "Who the hell is Brother Adam?" He was a benedictine  monk born in Germany in 1898, at the age of 11 he went to live at Buckfast Abbey. In 1916 whilst mankind was busy trying to wipe itself out with World War I the humble Honeybee was being wiped out across the UK by a tracheal mite called acarapis woodi. It was probably a pretty crap time to be a honeybee. Brother Adam started a breeding program to develop a bee that was resistant to the mite as well as relatively easy to handle and with a good honey yield. His end product was the Buckfast bee which we're still using nowadays. They contain DNA from Italian, English, French, Turkish, Greek and African honeybees.

Brother Adam  is attributed with inventing a kind of feeder. some people swear blind that he didn't and it's just named after him. Although it strikes me that a guy who spent 77 years in beekeeping and was bright enough to develop a strain of bees to suit our climate and survive a devastating disease which wiped out most of the nations original honeybees was quite probably bright enough to make a wooden box and drill a hole in it. The Adam's Feeder is essentially just that. A box with a hole in the middle. There's a little island bit in the middle that the bees can climb out of from underneath to get to the syrup and a small bowl over this to limit the bees access to the reserviour.

Adam's Feeder

You need to limit bee acess to the reserviour otherwise they'ed drown in the syrup. As you can see from my picture a bee managed to get into the syrup before I had chance to pop a cover onto it. Don't worry tho, I rescued her. The reserviour is waterproofed by being treated with varnish, although some people prefer paint, and other's molten wax -whatever rocks your boat, and the whole thing sits on top of the hive. The bees climb up into the island in the bowl get some syrup and take it back down into the hive to store, no doubt grumbling all the that some idiot stole all their honey and now they're having to faff about with sugar syrup. Waterproofing these two took a while as there was a few knots in the wood which no matter how many coats I tried kept leaking when I tested it with water before putting them on the hives. I the end I turned them on their sides and poured varnish into the knots then left them to dry. Seems to have done the trick.

Bees using Adams Feeder

When the feeder is almost empty you remove the plastic bowl and let the bees have full rein of the reserviour. In theory they then pick it completely clean, what I've found is that the sugar crystalises a bit a the bottom and the bees have trouble removing it but the wet stuff they manage with just fine. When you take the bowl off the bees come boiling up out of the island it's like a little bee volcano. With this feeder you can add more syrup to top it up without having to remove it from the hive making it prety handy for bulk feeding..