In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards explains why he prefers feeding fondant rather than sugar syrup as colonies transition from winter to spring. He outlines the drawbacks of exclusive fondant use—namely the difficulty of adding medication or stimulants to fondant and the loss of trickle‑feeding to simulate a late‑season nectar flow. He then details the advantages: fondant placed directly on the frames leaves ample open space in the brood nest for the queen to expand, provides an easy visual gauge of stored food, and eliminates the need to remove heavy, fully‑stocked frames before spring. Edwards demonstrates these points on‑site, showing a colony that received a 12.5 kg slab of baker’s fondant in November, how much of it has been consumed (3–4 kg remaining), and how the remaining fondant can be scraped off, melted into syrup, or discarded to give the bees unrestricted brood space for rapid spring expansion. He emphasizes that while fondant isn’t a universal replacement for syrup, it can simplify winter feeding and improve spring build‑up when managed correctly.
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In this video, I'm gonna tell you why I think it's better to feed fondant as opposed to syrup. Now, certain people on Twitter are gonna absolutely crucify me for this video because they don't like feeding fondant, but beekeepers do things differently. I'm not saying in this video that I'm gonna move over to exclusive feeding of fondant, although I have done that on some colonies this year and they're looking very good indeed. What I'm gonna do though is I'm gonna talk to you about the real benefits that you get from actually not feeding sugar syrup going into the winter and exclusively feeding your bees on fondant. I'll also talk about some of the cons as well, 'cause there are a couple of cons there. It's not as straightforward as just moving over solely to feeding fondant. There is a time and a place for syrup feeding as well. So let's talk about a couple of the cons first. First one is if you need to do any sort of medication for your bees, or you want to add any kind of Hive Alive or stimulant products, very difficult to do that adding it into fondant without buying pre-packaged fondant. For example, Hive Alive, they do a pre-packaged Hive Alive fondant, but it's way cheaper to buy the Hive Alive, to buy any of these boosters or stimulants, mix it into the syrup yourself, and then to feed the bees. The second negative with not feeding syrup is that you lose the ability to be able to trickle feed your colonies to simulate a late season flow, to boost them up, to get them big and nice and strong going into winter. That's not to say if you don't trickle feed them, you're not going to get big strong colonies going into winter, but you lose a little bit of that kind of manipulation ability— completely made up word there— but you're pretty much reliant on the bees in order to grow up to a suitable size to overwinter. In terms of the advantages of just feeding fondant though, This time of the season, you really do notice it. So if you just feed exclusively syrup, you feed your colonies up to weight, and then you are at the mercy of that colony going through the winter, coming into spring, that they are gonna use all of those stores and leave the queen a sufficient amount of space in order to lay up a big brood nest going into the spring. You might need to start taking out big frames of stores, putting them somewhere else and storing them. Can become a little bit of a faff. And if the queen doesn't have that space, it can trigger early swarming. The huge benefit, and I'm gonna show you this on some of the colonies colonies here today is that when you're doing that with fondant, as long as you've got sufficient fondant on top of the bars directly in contact with the bees, you can leave a big sufficient space within the brood nest. That means that the queen can expand the whole time, and you get a really easy visual on the amount of stores that the colony's got just by popping off the polyashforth feeder or the super or wherever you're keeping that fondant. And then all you need to do is when you get to the point that the colony is past cut-over day and they've got sufficient stores down in the brood box and they need additional space, you just scrape off The excess fondant, you can melt it down, turn it into 1:1 sugar syrup if you want to do that, or you can just chuck it away. It's probably like 2 or 3 pounds worth of leftover fondant. And then the bees are straight into rapid spring expansion mode. For me, that's a really big benefit in terms of feeding fondant and something that you just don't get when you feed syrup. So I'm going to go and get my bee suit on and I'm going to go and show you exactly what I mean. I'm going to open up some colonies and show you just how much fondant they've worked their way through going into winter and how much fondant is left in the spring. I'll pull out a couple of the side frames as well, see if we can see how much they're storing down in those frames. And I think next year I will do another series showing how to exclusively feed fondant and some of the benefits that it brings. So I'll get my bee suit on, let's go and take a look at the bees. Right, this is the colony that we're going to take a look at. They had a full slab, 12.5 kilo slab of baker's fondant. I didn't feed them up to weight, but they did have access to lots of local late season forage. I'm going to show you now just how much they've taken it down, how much fondant they've used, and how easy it's going to be for me come the end of the spring to just remove any excess fondant whilst leaving the bees the space within the brood nest in order to expand as best as they possibly can. Right, so here we go. You can see from this colony here, nice big strong colony. They're not too aggressive, they're quite docile this time of year. It's not that warm either, but as you can see, we've got, I would estimate, 3 to 4 kilos of that full slab of fondant left, and then we've got bees covering pretty much all of the frames. Now, as I said, I didn't feed this colony up to strength, so these outer frames here, they're not going to be chock-a-block full of stores. It means that when it's a little bit warmer, I can come back, I can assess the situation, I can remove any excess fondant. I'm not going to have the problem of having to remove additional frames that are chock-a-block full of stores. All I have to do is remove the fondant Maybe move some frames around within the hive, and that's going to give the bees everything they need in order to get that rapid spring expansion. So there we go, 12.5 kilogram slab of fondant was put onto that colony in about November time. I didn't fully feed them with syrup. I gave them a little bit of trickle feeding. They had some Himalayan balsam, but I didn't rim them all the way to the top and give them 14 liters of syrup. Instead, I put on a 12.5 kilogram slab of fondant. You can see that the bees have well and truly munched their way through that fondant now, and there's only a little bit left. We're coming towards the point now where the bees are going to be able to go out and actually forage for themselves, probably like 3 or 4 weeks away in this apiary here. So it's really easy for me to monitor how much fondant is left, and I can just add on maybe like 1 or 2 kilos now just to make sure that they're never in a position where they're going to starve, but also maintaining a really nice big open area in that brood nest for the queen to expand. If you want to take a look at a couple of the videos last year where Autumn fed some colonies exclusively on fondant, they had no syrup at all, check out this video here to see how they're getting on.
