Clearing Feeders with Straw/Hay

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Before we start this video, I've got a favor to ask. If you haven't done so already, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell. You'll be notified of every video. We've got nearly 150 videos on this channel. We've got loads and loads of videos to come over winter and back into the season again. We post a new beekeeping video every single week, so please hit the subscribe button, join us on our beekeeping journey. Today I'm going to do the quickest video I think I've ever done, and the video is going to be how to get your bees to empty their feeders. So you know, you'll see it on previous videos, my feeder of choice is a big poly Ashforth feeder. Now I like Ashforth feeders in wood as well. I just get the poly because I get the extra insulation on top. Now the disadvantages with poly Ashforth feeders, a bit expensive, I mean it can be quite expensive, like £20 a pop, but if you're on wooden hives, it's a really good suggestion to pop a poly Ashforth feeder on top because then you're getting the insulation where the colony wants it, which is on top of the cluster over winter. Other disadvantages with Ashforth feeders, are that although they can suck down a huge amount of syrup in a short amount of time, when the weather gets a little bit colder, they're sometimes a little bit reluctant to go into that feeder slot and feed for some reason. And then the final disadvantage, as far as I can see it, is that if the ground isn't perfectly level, you might get the syrup collecting in a corner that's not accessible by the slot. So this video, I'm going to show you how to clear the poly Ashford feeders with a really simple trick And I'm sure that loads of you are doing this already. It's a common trick, it's nothing new, but it's worthwhile just chucking it on a video for people that haven't seen it in action because it's a really useful trick. And that trick is to use hay. So we'll show you how to do it in the video. Really, really simple though. If you've got poly Ashforth feeders, or any feeders for that matter— this works on most feeders really, apart from contact bucket feeders— any feeder where they've got access to a pool of syrup And they access it via a slot. Really good tip is at the end of the season, take the slot out or take the circular feeder entrance out and just fill it with hay or straw. Choose a nice clean dry straw or hay, and what you're doing is, I mean, you can really stuff it in here, and then if you want, you can top syrup up over the top of it. And all you're doing is you're creating numerous islands for the bees to come out and to stand on while they feed in the straw. It's as simple as that. I've done this for a couple of years now. I got the tip from a really well-recognized bee farmer who uses the exact same Polly Ashforth feeder as I do, and it's a great tip. Like, it means that every last drop of syrup goes down into the brood box, but more importantly, you don't get any bees drowning whilst you do it. It's a pretty much foolproof method. I come back kind of early in the spring, And the straw is bone dry. They take every last drop out of the straw. It works really, really well. So in this video, I'm just going to show you how to do that really quick. I'm going to show you how to put some straw in a box. Right, so here is a colony that is heavy. It's got a good amount of feed in the bottom, but it's not taken down anywhere near as much feed as kind of the other hives within the apiary. Now I've got feed on there and the bees are accessing it via the slot. It's taken them a while to take it down though, so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to show you how to get them to take that feed down a lot quicker. So before you take this slot off, you want to put your hay or your straw in. Make sure it's dry, make sure it's clean. This stuff here, just kind of big stacks of it around, it's nice and dry, and what you want to do is just break that up into the colony. Put it straight into the feeder and let it kind of sink down. You need to put quite a lot of this in. Now you can put other stuff in as well. So here I've got some twigs and, you know, I mean some sticks and stuff. Take out the bigger sticks, but you do want a good proportion of hay, ideally hay or straw. Make sure it's nice and dry, and you just want to kind of push that down, get it to the point where it's absorbing all of that syrup. And that's about where we want to be. We want to basically fill it up, a few twigs, a few pine needles, a couple of pine cones. You don't want soil, you don't want anything like that. You want stuff that's kind of dry and it's not going to break down too quickly. So pine needles is good, hay is good, anything like that's pretty good. But like I say, if you want to go and buy something, just go and buy hay. That's what's ideal for it. And then just take— remove the slot, hit all your bees there. We've got this plastic slot here. Let's get rid of that. And the bees are like, wow, it's like all their Christmases have come at once in October. They will demolish every last drop of syrup from that now. As you can see from the video up there, they can't really drown. I mean, if you were just to take that slot out, you would just have pretty much all of your bees dead because they just go up there, drown, and then that's it, it's game over. By putting all of that stuff in there, so I mean pine needles, hay, straw, you give them something to kind of stand on, to drink, and to feed on that syrup without drowning. And that's it. Take your roof, put the roof on, and then they've still got access into that. You're not blocking anything off by putting the roof on. And then strap them up. And what we'll do is we'll come back in a couple of weeks and I'll show you how much of that syrup they've taken down. It was about 50% full, so probably 6 or 7 litres of invert syrup in there. 2 weeks, that would be gone. I reckon it'd probably be gone in a few days, but we'll give it a couple of weeks, come back to this video, and I'll show you how well they've taken it all down.

So the bees, they've not quite finished their syrup yet. This is about 4 days after I shot the original video, but as you can see, they're really, really busy, really enjoying themselves. They're making the most, they're climbing over all of the pine needles and all of the bits of stick that we put in there. You can still see we've got syrup at the bottom corner, but it has gone down. They've probably taken about half of it down in about 4 days. So like I say, probably, probably a couple of weeks for them to take that down to finish it off, but you can leave them like this over the whole of the winter. I mean, they're not going to start clustering up through that slot, there's really no risk that the queen's going to go up there. And if she does, she can easily get back down, and most importantly, she's not going to drown. So I'll give it a week or so more, maybe 10 more days, and I'll come back and I'll show you this feeder empty. So it's been a couple of weeks now since I, uh, put the straw and the hay and the pine needles into this feeder, and as you can see, it's all pretty much perfectly dry. There's a tiny little bit of syrup still pooling at the bottom, but these bees, you know what I mean, they've made the most of all of that. As you can see, it's really, really nice and dry. There's no drowned bees. That's the big thing with this. It's nearly impossible for the bees to drown because there's so many little different mini islands in there for them to go on there and forage. It's just a really, really good solution to stop any bees drowning in the feeders, but to get them to take down every single last drop of syrup.

So it's as simple as that. Like I say, probably not even worthy of a video, but As it's No Nonsense Beekeeping, we like to keep the little tips and little tricks, keep them nice and short, and give you the advice to help your bees get through the winter. So I hope you've enjoyed this one. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.

Bye.