Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey explains when to feed bees 1:1 syrup in early spring. Wait until temperatures hit 12°C, use trickle feeding with small daily doses over two weeks, and only feed if you have a clear purpose like splits or pollination contracts. Feeding without reason triggers early swarming and blocks the brood nest.
In this video, I'm going to tell you when it's okay to start feeding your bees one-to-one sugar syrup in the spring, and I'm also going to tell you why we don't feed them at Black Mountain Honey. So early spring, you can feed your bees one-to-one sugar syrup. Helps simulate a flow, helps the colony expand, gets the queen laying really, really quickly, and it brings on the difficulties of swarm management very early on in the season. That's the reason that we don't do it here. Before any of you go out and buy your one-to-one sugar syrup or you make it up yourself, ask yourself, why am I going to feed my colony colonies early on in the year? What is your reason for it? If you're making a concerted effort to go from, say, 10 to 50 colonies, or from 2 to 10 colonies, and your plan for the season is, I want to get them as big as possible early on in the season, buying some mated queens or graft some queens come May when I'm able to do it myself, and move from a small number of hives to a bigger number of hives, then I would completely agree. Feeding 1:1 sugar syrup is a great way to expand those bees early on in the season. I'll answer it in a little while as to when I would recommend starting that for us in North Wales and give you a rough guide in the UK of when is best to do that. The other reason that I would potentially do it is that if I was taking my bees to the oilseed rape and I wanted to get them nice and big and strong, or any pollination for that matter, and you kind of need to get, I don't know, 6 or 7 frames of bees and they're going to be inspected, both of those are valid reasons for early feeding in the UK to get your colonies big and strong, either for pollination or for splits. If you're just doing it because you think that's what you're supposed to do, I'm going to say I don't think you should be doing that. I don't think you should be feeding pollen patties. I don't think you should be feeding 1:1 sugar syrup. If you just want to build your bees up and have some bees get some honey, all it's going to do to you is give you really, really major issues early on in the season. And the likelihood is if you overfeed them too early in the season, come April, come May, your bees are going to swarm and you're going to lose the majority of your honey crop. So we don't do it. If I was doing it for splits, and I'm doing a separate video on this at the moment, which is how How many splits can I make in a single season from one colony? I'd say we're approaching that point right about now. In order for the bees to go up into the feeders, depending on what type of feeders you've got, you're looking at around 12 degrees. 12 degrees Celsius is pretty much borderline where the bees will go up. And if you're doing it in like a polyashworth feeder, then it doesn't make a massive amount of difference if the bees come up on one day, take some syrup down, and then for the next few days it's cold, so they don't come up and take it. They will keep on coming back up into that syrup and taking it as they need it. But you need to rewind a little bit and think, why am I feeding these bees? I'm doing it to simulate a flow. I'm not feeding them to give them stores. So it changes your approach and your strategy in terms of how much syrup you're going to give them on a daily basis. And we go back to what I said last year. If you've not checked out the videos last year on trickle feeding, I would highly recommend them. It's a really good system for late on in the year boosting colony numbers and early on in the year as well, simulating that regular flow. And giving you the benefit of not blocking the brood nest because then it's completely counterproductive. So my advice to you, if you're going to start feeding, I would say anytime from the middle of February onwards, as long as you're getting regular days where it's say 12 or 13 degrees Celsius. I would use 1:1 sugar syrup. You definitely don't need to feed 2:1 at this time of the year. However, 2:1 is no problem whatsoever and will give you the same result, but it's just more expensive. And then final tip is to go regular and often. So don't go into your colonies, give them 10 litres of syrup, and then the next week come back and give them 10 litres of syrup, because if you get a warm day, they'll just take down all of that syrup, clog the brood nest. You won't get any of the benefits of trickle feeding. The queen loses the space to lay in the brood box, and if anything, you've set them back. What you want to be doing is going in every single day, half a litre, 1 litre of 1:1 sugar syrup, and then as they take that down, maybe give them a day gap, go back in, put another half a litre of sugar syrup in. Do that over, say, 14-day period and monitor the amount of stores that are going into the brood nest. When you're moving into March, you can start pulling frames out if you really want to. Still not something that I would recommend, But what you're aiming for there is lots and lots of brood. Don't feed them and just overfeed them so they're clogging that brood nest, because it really will set your bees back. The final tip that I'd give you when you come to do that is before you put your feeders on, if this is something that you're going to do, try and go through the frames as best as you possibly can and try and remove any that are completely clogged with capped stores. They are not helping you out. You want to expand at this time of year, and you're simulating a flow by regular feeding. So a single frame of capped stores is really working against you. What you can do, take out that frame of capped stores, put it in the freezer, make up some splits with it, use it later on in the year, shift everything over a little bit, and put a single frame of foundation or preferably drawn comb right on the edge of the cluster. What the queen will do with that, hopefully if she is expanding, start to lay it up, and then you'll turn that into brood, which gives you this exponential rise of Bees going into spring. As for us, we're going to sit tight, we're going to sit on our hands, we're not doing anything until April. If you're making splits early on in the season, good luck to you, it's really good fun, you see huge expansion early on in the year. And if you want to see how we make splits in the same apiary, check out this video here.
