Feeding the Bees

I apologize for any crazy typos during this post. I was working gloveless today and happened to make the mistake of pinning a bee against the frame, now my right pointer finger is about twice it's normal size. I was in the process of trying to flip a frame around so my wife could take a picture of some odd looking comb. The worse part was that I was holding the frame and didn't have enough hands to remove the stinger meaning more and more venom was still being pumped in. I put the frame back in and used my hive tool to scrape it off, but enough about my stupidity, on with the post.

Lately I've been a bit concerned with how my bees are progressing. They appear to be building their numbers sufficiently, but they aren't really drawing out new comb. The 4 middle frames in each super are fully drawn out with nice brood patterns, but keep in mind 5 of those came with the nuc already drawn out. However, the other frames they aren't really taking too. They have drawn some nice beautiful comb on a few of the foundationless frames, but this was after I moved them into the middle of the brood frames. I think that will be the key to getting all the frames drawn out will be to slowly start rotating empty frames into the middle of the brood chamber so they draw them out, I can't do this too quickly though because you don't want to separate the brood by more than 1 empty frame. Some beekeepers are using 8 frame boxes because they find the bees really don't like drawing comb on the outer frames of a 10 frame box, however it's too late for that because I've already purchased all 10 frame supers.

In an attempt to help the bees along I have decided to mix up some 1:1 inverted sugar solution to feed the bees. The last week or so has been really mixed weather, but mostly rain. When it's raining outside the bees won't fly, so they need to rely on stored nectar during that period. Adding my frame feeder of syrup will help them cope during raining days so they aren't using up all the stores they've been previously saving up. Feeding bees also helps them draw out comb faster because the extra resources allow them to focus on other things than just feeding brood.

I made up my batch of feed using 5 pints of water with 5 pounds of sugar. I brought the water to a boil and then slowly added the sugar. Once dissolved I brought the solution back to a boil, added 3 tablespoons of vinegar and then boiled it for 20 minutes before letting it cool. The boiling process and added vinegar help break down the sugar into fructose and glucose, the idea being that it's easier for the bees to digest. While bees naturally have an enzyme that breaks sugar into fructose and glucose, it's thought that this allows them to use more syrup in a shorter time. There are many differing opinions on feeding bees, and I decided to give this a try first. In future I may just dissolve sugar in hot tap water to save both time and energy. I will need to purchase a food scale though because trying to weigh out 5 pounds of sugar while holding a pot on our bathroom scale was too time consuming. I didn't really document this process, but I will need to make up another batch for when I go out for the next inspection. I'll make sure to take some pictures then.

Once I got the solution made up it was just a matter of transferring it into the frame feeder and installing it into the hive. Unfortunately our camera battery died during the hive manipulation so I only have pictures of me filling the frame. When I go out to check on the hive in 2 weeks I'll get some picture of what it looks like installed.

Filling the feeder frame with 1:1 Syrup.


The feeder frame is hollow. It takes a spot of a normal frame in a super. The white plastic mesh helps the bees get to the syrup without drowning.


My wife took this thinking the white corner was the weird comb, however this is what a good frame should look like. All the white area is capped honey and the middle of the frame is where the brood is raised.