Christmas Treats for the Bees
It may be cold, wet and dreary out there, but its Christmas for the Homey Bees too, so we’ve given ourbees a Christmas treat this week in the form of some fondant.
Having not fed bees in the winter before we weren’t too sure how to do it but I gave it a go with two of our hives yesterday. I cut a hole in the bottom of a tub, covered the hole with plastic mesh and then placed some fondant into the tub and simply put that on top of the crown board. It was a nice easy procedure and should put the fondant close enough to the bees right on top of their last bits of honey stores.
It all went well, the bees were there and moving around but didn’t get disturbed and didn’t take any notice of me. So, today I headed off to do the same with the single hive we have in an out apiary. I was pretty unprepared with just the tub of fondant and a jacket, no gloves, no tools and no smoker.
The hive configuration here was a little different which I saw immediately was going to cause problems. It had a jumbbo feeder on it rather than a spare super with a contact feeder inside of it. This meant that I couldn’t just take out the contact feeder and replace it with the fondant feeder. Hmm, what to do? Maybe I’ll just be able to spread the fondant out over the top of the frames?
I took the roof and jumbo feeder off and could see bees striaght away. A few flew out to greet me but weren’t too aggressive, although I did warn Morgan that he might want to back off a bit! I placed the fondant on top of the frames but it was soon apparent that this approach wasn’t going to work. There were now quite a few bees taking an interest and a few crawled up my sleeves, so rather than pfaff around for too long I decided to remove an empty frame from the super and quicklydrop the lump of fondant down into the hive in its place. This seemed to work OK and hopefully won’t cause the bees too much distress so I then put the crown board and roof back on and left them to it.
I did think afterwards that it would probably have been better to simply place the fondant on top of the crown board, but in the heat of the moment I didn’t think of that.
We made a hasty retreat and jumped back into the car, only for me to find a bee up my sleeve, so we jumped back out and flushed her out.
Maybe not the most effiicient and controlled way to feed fondant to your bees, but hopefully it’ll be OK and they will enjoy their Christmas treat.
The weather has warmed up a bit here so the bees are getting a little active and will therefore need some food. In fact the bees in the out apiary were apparently out and flying this morning, I doubt if they found much of any use though and probably just wasted some energyso a feed was probably very welcome. Lets hope they have a good Christmas.
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I make a hole in the plastic covering over the fondant and put it on top of the crown board. I can’t say I did that perfectly this year as I also had no smoker and I squashed a few bees who started crawling up through the crown board hole as I put the fondant over.
Happy Christmas to you and your bees!