With autumn here, every beekeeper is thinking about ensuring that their bees have enough food to last them through the long cold winter months.
Honey bees are unique in that the whole colony rides out the cold of the winter. Other similar insects such as wasps and bumblebees die at the end of the season and only the queen survives to the next year by hibernating. Not so with honey bees! They have adapted to be able to store food for the winter (that is what honey is!).
So every beekeeper needs to ensure their colonies go into winter with as much stores as possible. How much a colony needs can vary (depending on the weather and also how active the bees are), but generally they need 20-30kg of food to survive.
So we’ve been feeding our bees sugar syrup over the last few weeks, which they collect and take down into the hive and store in honeycomb so it is close to them when its cold.
We have been trying a couple of different feeders, both of which are called “rapid feeders”. They are placed on top of the hive, and the bees access the sugar syrup by climbing up a central column, over the top of it, and down to the syrup. We have one small white feeder which holds 2 litres of syrup, so needs to be topped up every week at least. We also have a green “jumbo” feeder which works in the same way but holds up to 3 gallons!!
We have found that the bees are very hungry, and they have taken everything we have given them. So far they have devoured 3 gallons of syrup (across two hives), and we’ve given them more that they are currently working on.
