What Does the Novice Beekeeper Need to Know?
Number 11
"Feeding and Care for the Honey Bee"
"And Why"
It is now the start of "bee winter". Your feeding needs to be completed. Feed in the fall for spring time.
Bees do not make honey at temperatures under about 50oF. So, you need the spring food store up before Thanksgiving.
1:1 simulates nectar resulting in honey food storage and wax building
2:1 mimics honey and hence encourages honey storage
Define each season based on flowers,temperature, brooding activity
This is the mountains not fForida
Spring 1:1 feed for warm days to ensure don't run out of food stimulates wax building and comb production
Summer feed when not collection honey, feed weak hives/splits/packages
Fall 1:1 early if drawing comb for double hive body expansion or to draw comb in honey supers for next Spring 2:1 later just for honey storage
Winter 2:1 simulating honey so it is eaten (like unripened honey) or stored as honey, May not get capped.
CAUTION: Feeding too much syrup too fast can cause the bees to store honey in the brood are leaving no place for the queen to lay eggs. This can happen any time of the year and cause premature swarming.
There are so many bees in the colony and they want to put the new unripened honey near the brood area so it is ready to feed to the larvae. A full colony of bees will store syrup faster than nectar because the entire foraging process is shortened by syrup at or near the hive. They will store this excess honey in the brood area, filling it up.
You start doing colony feeding when you artificially start a colony. This would be when you install a package into a hive box (brood chamber or nuc box) or do an unequal split from an existing colony. This means you now have a "weak" colony that needs help getting established. They may need to draw wax or put up honey in drawn comb frames. There may be a shortage of forager bees with an abundance of in hive storage and nurse bees. It is really immaterial if there is or not a queen. If there are larvae that need fed the colony will need adequate feed for them. It takes about 7 cells of food to raise one larva. That is honey and pollen (bee bread).
When you measure the number of foragers, you want to make them as efficient as possible. How many are there and how much time will it take round trip to bring the food back to the hive. If you can supplement them with sugar syrup and pollen (or substitute) at the hive you will expedite the food storage inside the hive. If the queen is there and laying eggs the need for food will be higher than if there is little brood and the colony is raising a new queen. Pollen substitute is a good way to stimulate the nurse bees when caring for larval brood.
It takes about 58 days for the results of a new queen to start affecting the hive population. Then food requirements will start to rise.
4 days for queen egg to hatch
12 days more for queen to emerge from cell
9 days to mature before mating
3 days for mating flights
9 days for hormone development before start of egg laying
21 days for her first worker bees to emerge.
58 total days
Seasonal feeding management:
Spring feeding used for several situations. When your bees have made it through the winter (February). You need to monitor the stored food stuffs (both honey and pollen) very closely. As the cluster warms up it will consume more food. There may not be enough blooms for the bees to forage enough nectar from. All blooms don't produce lots of nectar. There may not be enough warm hours in the day for the bees to forage and bring enough nectar home to replace what the cluster is eating in 24 hours. At the hive, syrup feeding (in hive or at front door) can alleviate this situation. Field feeding near the hive can help but it still has to be a warm day to draw the bees to the feeder. Feeding above the top bars inside the hive is a very natural place for the bees to find winter stored food. A baggie feeder works very well here.
You do not need pollen or pollen substitute until the queen is laying eggs which have started to hatch. Frequently there is abundant spring pollen from the alder trees, pussy willow, henbit weed, and red maple. Watch for the start of these blooms.
To keep the weeds down under and around my bee hives, I sprinkle granulated (red) agricultural mineral salt on the ground. Under the electric bear fence it keeps the weeds at bay. Under the hives it does double duty. It keeps the grass and weeds down and also desiccates the hive beetle larvae that go out of the hive and pupate in the ground within 3 feet of the hive. As the salt is dissolved by dew and rain the bees will lick it up. The salt is necessary for them to make the enzymes they use to make honey.
A management decision that you need to make in early spring is whether you want to maximize colony population growth or let it come on naturally and slow. If you want to make spring splits you might want to stimulate the queen to lay eggs sooner and faster. The same if you want double hive bodies full of bees to collect more honey. Stimulating the queen will result in attaining maximum population levels earlier in the late spring which will cause early swarming. This is good for an attentive beekeeper. You now have small splits you can make to avoid swarming. You can sell, trade, or keep the nucs you have just made. In the spring other beekeepers are looking for replacement bees for the hives that died out over the winter.
Summer has arrived (early June) and your bees are doing well! Your good working hives do not need feed. There are enough flowers to keep them happy. If your hive is short on bees (a less than the most productive queen) you can add more bees to help collect more honey. This addition can stimulate a slow queen into laying more eggs. How to add more bees (equalize the populations) is a discussion for another paper.
A single hive body will need 7 ½ frames with bees working on them to collect a super of honey.
Other good indicators of a colony ready to go, are: All the bees do not go into the hive in the evening. They can be covering the front of the hive almost to the top. Or, they can be hanging down in clusters the size of quart jars (bearding). As long as they are sitting there calmly, they are not "quite" ready to swarm. But, they will shortly. See the paper about swarm management. This is a good time to make a two frame split. When you pop the telescoping cover you would like to see bees coming up through the air vent hole. Maybe, they are completely covering the top of the inner cover. When you remove the inner cover you would like to see bees two layers deep on the top bars filling all the cracks working the sides of the frames. All colonies don't look like this.
A dearth can happen anytime, summer or fall. If it quits raining adequately and gets hot the nectar will not be produced in the flowers. Honey bees do not eat ripened dehydrated honey. If they did, they would shrivel up like a raisin. They mix water with the 18% moisture stored honey before consuming it. If the temperature inside of the hive gets much above 950 F the bees must collect water and bring it back into the hive to evaporate as air conditioning to cool the hive down. If you are not near a continuous water source (creek, pond, swimming pool, hot tub) you may need to provide a ready source of water. A bird bath with gravel for the bees to stand on is excellent. The same with a kiddies blow up swimming pool if you need lots of water for lots of hives. You can rig a bucket or barrel to slowly drip water onto a slanted board with several sponges attached to hold the water for the bees. Your imagination is needed here.
Fall starts as soon as your honey collection nectar flow ends. Once you remove your honey supers, you have too many bees in the colony. You have reduced the number of square inches of hive space by quite a lot. The quickest and easiest remedy is to place the honey supers back on the hives after the honey is removed from the frames. You probably have more than one honey super per hive stack. That is okay. Place multiple honey supers on your weakest hives.
You need to clean the left over honey out of the honey supers and frames before storing them until next year. Let the bees do this for you. They will lick those frames completely dry in 2 days. They will place this honey down in their brood boxes for winter food. Some people just cross stack the honey supers out in the field so the bees can get to them. But, so can the neighbor's bees. Keep this honey for your own bees. When you remove the dry honey supers, leave one above the brood box so the bees have enough space in the evening and they can put up a little extra honey for winter. This will help discourage fall swarming.
This is also a good time to make fall 4-5 frame spits and equalize colony populations. Early August splits will still have time to raise a queen (58 days). If you purchase a mated queen it will accelerate the population growth of the colony by 58 days. This should give you a good 6 frames or better hive going into winter. To help these spits you put frames with drawn comb, brood, food, and bees in them. The loosing colony that was on the edge of swarming has enough time to draw new foundation into combs and fill them with honey and or pollen if this is done at the start of goldenrod bloom (late Aug. to early Sept.)
Winter and Spring feeding needs to be done in the fall. It takes 90 lbs. of honey to get a decent hive population through the winter until the end of February when adequate blooming starts. That is a deep hive body plus some honey in a honey super. I start feeding 1:1 syrup in August. The hive may appear to have adequate honey, but, as soon as the goldenrod quits blooming the honeybees will start eating the winter stores. Feeding replaces this consumption as it occurs. There are lots of bees in the colony to help put up lots of honey. The ambient temperature is high enough (above 50o) to support honey production.
In our area the honeybees will fly several days a week all winter long. They return to the hive and consume stored food to build up their energy reserves. As the winter progresses the bees will start to consume their stored body fat reserves which makes them more susceptible to diseases they are carrying. Humans carry staph, strep, and mursa in their bodies all the time. If you are weakened by injury or disease it is when the disease affects us.
The cluster tends to stay in the center of the hive approximating a 3 dimensional ball. It will expand in warmer temperatures and contract when colder (day and night). The queen will stay in the center. The bees in the center of the cluster will be warm enough to eat the honey in front of them. As the cluster expands and contracts it tends to move up the brood frame. It may not expand enough for the bees to eat the honey all the way to the outer edges of the frames. On warm days some bees may wander away from the cluster to gather the honey in the peripheral area. These bees can get caught out there if there is a sudden cold snap during the day. They will not survive very many days isolated from the warmth of the cluster. The cluster can move up in the hive until it hits the inner cover. Once the food is exhausted, starvation can set in. If there are frames of honey (frame 1-2 &9-10) move them above and centered over the cluster so the bees can continue to move up. Make sure you removed any queen excluders from the hive in late fall. These are only designed to keep egg laying queens out of honey supers.
You do not need to feed pollen (or substitute) because the brood area is shrinking and the goldenrod allowed the bees to collect enough pollen to get through the winter. By Thanksgiving the queen probably will cease egg laying.
Emergency feeding of a colony that is too low on stored food stuff from last fall may be required. Here in the Northeast Georgia mountains that can occur in late January to early March. If you have live bees that appear healthy, feeding might get them through to warmer weather and early bloom time. You may confuse population decrease between starvation and loss due to the effects of varroa mite (diseases vectored by the mites). If you witness lack of food in the hive the starving live bees will appear to shiver. After this stage you will find dead bees in the hive with their heads completely down in the cells and their abdomens sticking out of the cell. It is too late then. Bees can starve to death a few inches from honey because it was too cold for them to move over to the stored honey. This can reoccur several times. Each time separating a few more bees from the cluster. Each time the cluster gets smaller and smaller until it is too small to keep the queen warm and everyone dies.
If you think emergency feeding is necessary there are several techniques. I think the best is to feed hamburger sized patties of "fondant". You can buy it or make it. It is just real thick sugar frosting. The recipe is on the internet. It contains enough liquid so the bees can readily eat it.
You can dust the bees with powdered sugar. You can powder granulated sugar in the kitchen blender or use 10x confectioner's sugar. Some people believe the cornstarch in the confectioner's sugar is detrimental to the bees but there is so little in the sugar I doubt that. The honeybees will clean it off themselves and their buddies and eat some. Being dry they will need a little water to help digest it. There is enough moisture inside the hive from respiration condensation for the bees.
You can feed granulated sugar or candy. The bees must go to the sugar and actually chew it. They will require more moisture to dissolve the sugar granules or the pieces they bite off. Usually, there is enough respiration condensation for this but the process takes longer than powdered sugar.
Detailed feeding practices
1:1 or 2:1 or High fructose corn syrup. What works for you? The honeybees are extremely flexible and will eat about anything that is sweet, even M&Ms.
We are talking about a sugar to water ratio. Sugar:Water. In cool weather you can mix it up and store large batches. In warmer weather it can ferment. It is not as tasty as beer. There are several ways to help stabilize your mixture which will not harm the bees. All flowers do not have the same sugar:water ratio so you don't need to worry about precision mixing.
1:1 syrup simulates nectar. This helps the bees make wax. In the spring you may have foundation that need pulled. 1:1 will stimulate that. It takes more work for the bees to convert and dehydrate 1:1 into honey. During warm weather with lots of bees in the colony this is not a problem. There is more moisture to extract from 1:1 than 2:1.
2:1 syrup simulates honey. In fall when you are just trying to fill the hive up with honey the bees look at 2:1 syrup as honey and are just transferring it from the feeder to the cell. There is less work (enzyme additions and dehydration) required. Every time bees pass nectar from one be to the other on the way to the storage cell it is dehydrated, starting at about 98% moisture down to 65%. As it is passed between bees, enzymes are also added. 2:1 is passed fewer times than 1:1. You can cheat here and raise the sugar ratio as high as you can get it and keep the sugar in suspension. That is somewhere about 2 ½:1. You don't want your syrup to crystalize in the feeder or the comb. During the cooler weather of fall there is less moisture introduced into the hive from dehydration. This allows the honey to be capped faster.
High Fructose Corn syrup is available to you in what ever container you desire. Five gallon buckets to tanker trucks. You have to know what viscosity you want. Sometimes you have to add water to the HFC syrup to make it useable. It is not necessarily the best diet for honeybees but it will keep them alive for the winter.
To create a more healthful food for my bees I supplement the syrup with flavoring (spearmint oil and lemongrass oil) like "Honey-Bee-Healthy. You can make your own. You can add amino acids and vitamins and minerals to make the syrup more like nectar. These all come in bottles from the bee supply house. The bottles are expensive but you are only feeding teaspoons at a time.
I believe these supplements help the over wintering health of the bees. White sucrose sugar and HFC syrup have no nectar matching flavor, amino acids, or vitamins and minerals. All of which are necessary for the healthy bee.
To stabilize my syrup, I add ¾ cup of bleach per 5 gallons of syrup. This keeps it from fermenting and keeps black algae from growing in it. Bleach is a salt and the honeybees like it. Are they not attracted to swimming pool water?
A new thought: Maybe the bees need more pollen store in the winter Pollen substitute during and after goldenrod???
Explain "fat bodies" and correlation to started out hives may have honey stored but not pollen???