Budding Cottage

Over wintering

Well, going into the winter there are many different bee keeper perspectives.  Most of my hives that I have gone with, are trying over wintering on a brood and a half.  That said, at least two are only on a single brood box for the winter, so we shall see what works well and what does not.

Sugar syrup however is a bit of a challenge.  Some statistics.

It appears that it would be a good idea for bees to have at least 37lbs (almost 17kg) of honey to over winter with.  That is good if they have been busy, and you have not taken honey. If their brood box is rammed with honey stores and they have spares in their supers then GREAT.  However, mine do not.  My garden apiary bees have part stores in their brood boxes and part stores in their supers.  My orchard bees have almost no stores at all.  And a bad spell of weather makes things worse as bored bees stay home in the rain and comfort eat….well at least if they can’t get out then they eat their stores rather than bring in new stuff.

Now a complex grasp of mathematics is probably not required.  However, there is a real pick and mix of volumetric and mass units in imperial and metric… so beware….Many beekeepers just give the bees sugar syrup until they stop taking it.  Others just go with a few gallons and then leave it, or estimate it.  However, I did want some sort of idea of how big this job really was. So here goes.

A reasonable estimate at this time of year is say 15lbs of honey that the bees have needs to be supplemented with sugar that you need to give them.  1lb of sugar supports around 1.25lbs of honey.  That means for my garden girls it is likely that for each hive they are short say 22lbs of honey and so need 17 or so lbs (nearly 8kg) of sugar each.

The recipie is to mix up 1kg of sugar to 1pint of water.  Now whilst you would first think that 8kg would go into about 1 gallon or 8 pints (or almost 5 litres) of water – well it does.  But it produces more than 1 gallon of sugar syrup by simple chemistry, maths and physics….which is confusing when you are thinking in terms of how many gallons of sugar syrup you have been feeding. Whilst you might think – great, I have given them a gallon each which is about 8kg of sugar, in reality you have not because adding the mass of the sugar to the water increases the volume.

So, to feed around 24kg of sugar to the bees, how much sugar syrup do I need? (This is like a chemistry test paper).

I know that, in practice, from 16kg of sugar, made up into syrup, I get around 5 gallons of syrup (around 20litres), so theoretically I get just over 3kg of sugar into the bees when I feed them 1 gallon of syrup. This indicates that to feed 24kg of sugar to the bees I need to give them a total of 8 gallons of syrup.

I have just made up around 5 gallons of sugar syrup for these hives,in theory they need a further 3.  If I didn’t take account of this effect of mass then I would assume that all was well and that this was enough.  Instead I shall have to see whether they finish it or not! (when I was first settling in the bees and they had to work fresh foundation into comb, from scratch, I also fed them, and they got through similar amounts until the summer nectar flow kicked in.

Multiply this up for 3 hives anyway and you are talking about 51lbs of sugar (23kg) spread out in just under 8 gallons of syrup. This means to me that I need to at least fill all of my contact feeders once more. If not more.  Which means another 8 pack of 2kg bags of sugar for the garden bees.

Now comes Apiary 2, the orchard bees, who gave up a harvest of honey but now have almost no stores of their own, having not made good the loss.  For these bees I may have to assume more like 30lbs of honey required which needs about 24lbs (around 11kg) of sugar each.  For two hives this is 48lbs (around 22kg) of sugar.

Well, on 27th I made up 16kg of sugar into syrup which produced around 5 gallons of syrup into two large feeders. This implies that I still have an additional 6kg  (about 13lbs) of sugar to make into solution and give to the girls which means making up a further 2 or so gallons of the syrup (6kg of sugar which is 3 lots of 2kg bags).

So, the upshot of all this is that it sounds like I have not yet given the garden girls enough, but need to give them another contact feeder full – we shall see how much they use.  And it sounds like I will need to provide yet more to the orchard girls, which may be around a gallon each. If these calculations are anything to go by then we are talking around 100lbs of sugar to see 5 hives through the winter.  In terms of kitchen stickiness quotient, this means 45kg of sugar in 45 pints of water, making 15 gallons of sugar syrup (120 pints or 68 litres).

It that says anything, it is that next year I will need to keep a close eye on the bees to ensure that they have decent honey stores!  It is also interesting that we are potentially expecting the girls to produce 125lbs of honey over the next month… not bad going girls!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at 9:33 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.