Winter Feeding and Mite Teatment

Through winter the bees are all busy keeping warm, clustered in their hives away from the prying eyes of beekeepers. Barring a bit of hardware maintenance, woodwork and renewing Beekeeping Association subs there isn't much for Beekeepers to be doing. However there are two bee related tasks still to be done: mite treatment and Winter feeding.


The mite treatment as with every other year is an organic acid treatment which kills off a huge proportion of the varroa mites in the hive. There's a couple of options but most beekeepers seem to be using an Oxalic Acid solution. It's easy to make, just dissolve 35g Oxalic Acid Dihydrate in one litre of sugar syrup -most sources say to use 1:1 syrup but 2:1 syrup has been used by some. The hive is then opened and the syrup trickled between the frames directly onto the bees. As the bees move about the solution gets distributed over the whole colony and onto the mites. It takes 5ml per seam for a National hive and by my calculations 6.6ml per seam for a Commercial. It's only effective when the mites are actually on the bees though so needs to be done then the colony is broodless. If there's brood most of the mites will be in the comb with new larvae and the oxalic solution won't reach them. Waiting for a long enough cold snap took a while but I treated my colonies about a fortnight ago.

Mite treating time

Oxalic solution is very cheap and easy to make at home, unfortunately it's no longer legal for beekeepers to do so. Last year a firm called Api-Bioxal registered it as medical product so now any treatment with Oxalic Acid needs approval from the Vetinary Medicines Directorate. This means you can't just whip up your own solution or buy it from just anyone anymore, you need to buy the approved and expensive VMD approved product. The approved Api-Bioxal currently costs £10.99 for a 35g  sachet of what is clearly Oxalic Acid Dihydrate, if you shop around and source your own >99.5% pure Oxalic Dihydrate you get about half a kilo for that price. So the cost of treating my 8 hives with Api-Bioxal comes to about ninety quid whereas using other Oxalic Dihydrate I'd be paying under a fiver. Not that I'm suggesting anyone does ..obviously I used the super expensive pricey approved stuff and the photo above shows a bottle of lemon barley water I was drinking at the time and the syringes were just so I could drink it through the veil of my beekeeping jacket. Honest.

Can see the roughly round shape of the cluster here.

I've not seen my bees for a long time, what with it being winter and all but opening hives in Winter is quite different to Summer. In the summer bees tend to be distributed allover the comb in the brood box but in winter they form a rounded cluster and when you remove the crownboard you can clearly see the shape of it. All being well the cluster moves in the hive using stored food from the combs.

When I was doing the treatment I found four of my colonies are still very densely populated with huge clusters whereas two are like the one above where there's been some of the expected die back and two are looking very low on numbers. The two colonies that are low on numbers may struggle to generate enough heat so I whilst I've  so far left the mesh floors open with those two I closed them to try an conserve heat -I very much doubt they'll make it through Spring but shall wait and see.

You can order anything, as long as it's sugar.

In Winter hives can be running a little low on stores -especially big strong colonies that haven't experienced much die back  through Winter. Because of that it's fairly common practice to give the colonies a little food top up. Bees won't take syrup when it's cold so instead the beekeeper can give them dry sugar or fondant. In previous years I've made candy boards which are effectively huge square sugar lumps covering the top of the hive so the bees have access to emergency food wherever they are in the colony. I had planned to make newer shallower candy boards but never got round to it so this year I've gone back to fondant again.

Fondant can be given in a block, as it comes from the packet, placed above the feed hole in a crownboard with a plastic food tub above it which I've done previously. This time I decided to just cut the Dr Oetker Ready to Roll Icing very thinly and place it above the frames in the small gap between the frame tops and the crownboards. With the fondant in place the crownboards, insulation and roofs were quickly put back in place so the bees could get back to warming the air in there.

Bees making cleansing flights, must be quite a relief for them.

On Monday just gone I popped to the out apiary and was able to see bees making cleansing flights although according to my weather app it was only 7 degrees Celsius. It's been a fairly warm winter so far, which isn't great for the bees. In a cold winter they're less active and cluster tighter using less food, when it's warmer they're more active which means using up more energy and depleting food stores faster. In early Spring I'll need to check how much they've got left as that's the time they're at most risk from starving.

Feeding and Feeders

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Candy Board

My bees have had a pretty ropey year and although I've fed them syrup till they're no longer taking it I'm not entirely convinced they have enough to get through the winter ahead. We're expecting the worst winter in 60 years according to long range weather forecasting although it's not unknown for the Met Office to be a little out I'd rather err on the side of caution so in case of any shortfall in the bee's food stores I've decided to add a Candy Board to each hive

A Candy Board, also called Sugar Board, is basically a wooden frame full of sugar that goes in the hive directly above the bees. If they run out of food and start to climb upwards they can find it and start eating. Obviously pouring a few kilos of sugar into a square wooden frame is just going to leave you with and empty frame a messy floor  so you need to add a little water to make the sugar cake together, put a wire mesh to hold it all up and add something to hold the wet sugar as it sets. They're fairly simple to make really, there's quite a good 'How To' here or you could just read on.

First up was making the wooden frame. A Commercial brood box has the same outer dimensions as a National brood box which is 46.5cm square. I decided to use some 45x75mm wood for the project, it doesn't really need to be that thick, 22mm will do in fact but I wanted them to be very solid so they'll survive a few winters and I figured the extra thickness might reduce heat loss too. There's a few ways you could put the frame together I opted to cut the ends of the sides diagonally at 45 degrees and screw them together. Time to break out the mitre saw that's been kicking about in the shed for a few years. It's meant to be bench mounted really and previously I've used it on the ground standing on it to hold it steady but this time I bolted the base to a piece of scrap wood and clamped that in the workbench which kept it still and made it so much easier (safer!) to use.

Guess the patio needs a clean then

I also rubbed the blade with a wax candle to stop it sticking to the wood and the top bar of the saw to keep it moving smoothly too. A little while later (okay a little while, a coffee break, and another little while later), I had 12 isosceles trapezoids, a tired arm and a couple of blisters. I also got some wire mesh, the holes need to be big enough for the bees to get through unimpeded, I opted for 13mm mesh just because that's what the shop had.

Pretty much finished. Not.

Turns out holding the frames square to pre drill and screw the corners together was a tricky business but eventually I had 4 square wooden frames held together by three screws per corner.

Squares

 That done the frames needed wire mesh stapling into place, and a hole drilling into one side of each. The mesh was stapled to the inner vertical sides of the frame so they didn't interfere with the fit of the candyboard to the hive. The hole has two purposes one is it allows ventilation and the other to allow the bees a second entrance for in case the lower exit gets blocked, by for example a load dead bees or snow or whatever. I used a 10mm drill bit for that. It just needed to be big enough to let one bee out and given that a bee space is 9mm wide that should be adequate for an easily defensible entrance.

Empty Candy Boards

With the woodwork done they just needed the food adding. I bought 15kilos of sugar so I could put 5 in each board. There's recipes for the filling all over the net, one here, it seems to come down to one cup of sugar per five pounds of sugar and a spoonful white or apple cider vinegar if you like. I had some left over 2:1 syrup that the bees hadn't taken so I opted to use that instead of adding water. Normally you place newspaper of something similar over the mesh to hold the syrup as it sets then later the bees chew through it to reach the sugar. However I had read on another blog that this could mean there were bits of paper and pulp in the left over sugar which a thrifty beekeeper might want to use to make 1:1 syrup in the spring, so instead I used some plastic wrap on the bottoms of the boards so I could pop the sugar in to dry then remove it before adding the boards to the hives -should make it a little more accessible to the bees if they need it too.

7 kilos of sugar and a little syrup

Using a huge stainless steel pan I dropped in 7 KG of granulated white sugar to start and added some syrup and started to stir. It was really hard work. I added more syrup as I progressed till the sugar was all a little damp then I started adding it to the boards.  The rest of the sugar I mixed in smaller batches before adding to the boards.

Small gap near the entrance/exit.

There needs to be a small gap in the sugar near the entrance/exit hole for ventilation and so the bees can get in and out of it if they need to. Some people leave in wooden blocks or a plastic box whilst the sugar sets, I just pulled the stuff back so there was a small gap. I did the same in all three boards -although in the picture below you can't actually tell.

Pollen supplement

I'd read a few people talking about adding pollen supplement to their candyboards so I bought a kilo of Candipolline Gold from Fragile Planet. Looking at the website it says it's a made of sugar, milk and egg proteins and and sterilised bee pollen -sterilised with gamma rays no less. Wasn't it Gamma radiation that turned Dr Banner into the Hulk? Well if I have angry green bees in spring I guess I'll know why... I wrapped each patty in plastic except for the side that's exposed to the bees, I'm not sure if the plastic is totally necessary but all the images I've seen have the plastic still on so I figured I'd follow suit.

Candy Boards, filled and waiting to go

Next up they just had to dry. I decided to pop them on the hives when I opened them to do the Oxalic Acid treatment  as I don't want to be messing them about too much when it's cold. When the sugar had dried it was set like rock. As well as providing emergency food if needed the huge block of sugar should also act as a humidity sink helping keep it nice and dry in the hives over winter.

Candy boards on the hives

A fortnight later I put the boards onto the hives. After a little smoke to push the bees down into the the frames I place the boards directly on top of the brood boxes with the entrance/ventilation holes facing the same direction as the hive entrances. Hopefully they won't be needed and the sugar that's left in Spring will be used to make syrup but if the bees do find themselves short on supplies over winter it's there for them.

Now, much to their relief no doubt, I get to leave the bees alone for a few months.