Feeding our bees.

Sometimes our bees need a bit of a top up feed. It might be because the weather is being unkind and they can’t get out to collect nectar, because there’s a gap in local forage e.g. June Gap, because we want to top up their supplies for winter, or because we want to give a new colony a helping hand – this would be a nuc or a collected swarm.

What to feed?

We should always use white granulated sugar or a product made from white granulated sugar – never ‘raw’ or ‘unbleached’ sugar because these types of sugar contains too many impurities that can make our bees very sick. White granulated sugar is as clean a food as our bees need.

Historically, and if fairly urgent, some beekeepers would just simply cut an X into a 2lb packet of white granulated sugar, pour in a cup of water and leave it for a few moments, then invert the pack over the bees. When the paper was thrown out of the front it meant two things – the colony was still alive and that they might want some more. So feeding bees doesn’t have to be hard or complicated and all the fancy measuring isn’t as crucial as we’re led to believe.

What to feed, and when.

For most commercial beekeepers there’s no real choice; it’s a commercially produced invert syrup or nothing. These syrups, which only come in one strength, are more expensive but then time is also expensive. It would take one lone bee farmer many, many, hours to mix enough gallons of syrup to feed several hundreds of colonies; time that is better spent on other beekeeping-related tasks.

A June Gap

The June Gap usually refers to a time when there is little natural forage for bees because the Spring flowering plants have all finished and the summer ones have yet to get started. It's a time when some beekeepers may need to give their colonies a bit of a top-up syrup feed.

We don't seem to have a forage gap in the small apiary this year, but there has been a rather long gap between posts. This one is just a top-up!

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When life gets in the way of writing a beekeeping blog.

The blog has been very quiet for the past few months, not because we got bored with writing things down but because there have been a lot of things going on in our lives that have been more important than writing about beekeeping on the internet.

These 'things' don't look set to get any easier over the coming months and years, but hopefully we'll find time to put fingers on keyboard again before too long.

The bees are fine, and we're all looking forward to a good beekeeping year.

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