Budding Cottage

Feeding the girls to help them into winter – and its proving to be a sizeable challenge.

Today (28th) Chris kindly helped me tackle the Apiary 1 girls as he prepared to move the nurse bees from the wild garden.  This was a great boon as I had a sore shoulder and arm, making lifting hive parts somewhat painful.

First I made up syrup of 2 gallons of water and 35ishlbs of sugar .  Then I added it to three large contact feeders of just over a gallon each.  Then we opened each hive and checked and adjusted the frame spacings on all of the brood boxes, since some of them were too big and if the girls are left to their own devices over winter, this could get messy.  Then we upended each syrup feeder into a brood box eke and left the girls to it.  This actually took quite some time.  Not least of the challenge was to stuff foam in the entrances to the hive, as robbing for honey and sugar were becoming quite rife and the air was full of bees and wasps seeking out their winter stores.  The bees had been huddling around their doorways discussing matters quite a bit -a reasonable sign that they were worried, though many were still coming home with himalyan balsam over their backs which at least shows they still have a food and pollen source nearby.

One of the minor challenges at year end is that if you have enough decent feeders, you often need an eke to put them in so that the roof can go back on, making the hive secure.  All of my hard work constructing brood boxes at least paid off here, with 3 free to use.

By the end of several hours we had 3 hives with feed and that were closer to being shipshape going into the winter.

On 27th my dad kindly lent me a hand to tackle the Apiary 2 orchard bees.  These had been highlighted by the bee inspector as being urgently in need of stores and so it was a priority to get food into their hives.

I made up a batch of sugar solution of 2 gallons water and around 35lbs of sugar.  The resulting syrup, once we were on site, were poured into 2 large maisemore bulk feeders and placed on the hives.  Whilst we were there, we replaced an old hive base with a good varroa mesh base from Maisemore so that the apiguard treatment on the hives would be more efficient and a drop count could be established.  We also removed an old empty super from one of the hives so that both are on a brood and a half for the winter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Apiary 1, Apiary 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.