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.

When Ribes comes into flower.

One of the things I was told as a beginner beekeeper was that Spring colony inspections shouldn't commence until the Flowering Currant was in bloom - that's Ribes sanguineum for those who prefer the Latin names.  


(Image from BBC Plant Finder)


Rules of Thumb
We have one of these shrubs in our garden and it's only just in flower, which would suggest it's time to open the hives for the first inspection of the season - but this particular plant is growing in a cold pocket, so always flowers later than any other in the area. This means that the 'rule' doesn't work too well for me and my bees.

Apple Blossom Time.

Our fruit trees are, at last, covered with blossom.

There is more blossom per per tree than I've ever seen on these trees, which we planted not long after we moved into this house. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because the ground has been so very wet for so long - it started raining late last Spring and didn't stop for more than a few days at a time until early this year.

It may be that the trees are trying to make up for last year's lost crop - we had apples, or thought we had, until September, but then they all vanished. Not exactly disappeared, but they all dropped off the trees. It was a strange thing because we had no fruit at all. No apples, no pears. Nothing! If we had been dependent on our own crops we would have been in trouble, because virtually all our vegetable crops failed too - either rotted in the ground or eaten by slugs.