Feeding Bees Fondant In Winter - Emergency Fondant To Prevent Starvation

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and welcome to another episode of No-Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to look at how to add fondant for winter feeding. So the first thing to say about feeding fondant in winter is, if you can get away without it, you don't need to feed it. For me personally, fondant feeding is a bit of an insurance policy to get some of the weaker hives through the winter. If everything is perfect throughout the season, so you have kind of like a good crop throughout the spring and the summer, and then the temperature is good and the bees can bring in a lot of stores for overwintering, and you can get that liquid feed on in the autumn months, so kind of September, October, November, then you shouldn't have to feed fondant. And that definitely is the, the prime way of doing it. That's what you should be aiming for. Is keeping your hives in a healthy state throughout the year. Lots of stores throughout the winter. You can check them regularly either by kind of weighing them with a luggage scale or coming and hefting them or just kind of maybe opening them up and actually looking to see if they're close to some stores without adjusting any of the frames. You just want to kind of crack them open and see. But that's exactly what you're looking to do is to avoid having to feed fondant in the winter to your main colonies, to your big production colonies. And the only reason for that is to kind of minimize the hassle of feeding fondant in the winter and the cost of feeding fondant in the winter. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just something extra that you might be able to get away without having to do if you feed sufficiently in the autumn. Now last season for me was a particularly bad season. It rained in North Wales and it rained and it rained some more, so my colonies, they built up at the wrong time. They didn't kind of hit the flows when I wanted them to. It got cold, so they didn't take down the syrup. I had a number of issues, so a lot of my colonies went into winter light, and that caused me real problems. So this year I started feeding fondant in November, and I kind of was feeding it not so much as an insurance policy, but to actually give them their full kind of winter resources in the form of a kind of a fondant block. And I knew when I was feeding them in November, I knew that they were going to get through the fondant blocks that I gave them that I'd given them and that I was going to have to come back in December or January and give them another block. So that's kind of what I'm doing today. I'm going around my colonies, I'm checking them for stores. All I'm doing is I'm kind of giving them a little bit of a heft just to see what their weight's like. I'm opening up where I've put on the boxes before to see if there's any fondant left, if they've got through them, if there's any activity. I'm trying to do that with as kind of minimal intrusion to the bees as I possibly can. So I don't ever take out any frames in the winter because there's no benefit to doing it, and all you can do is damage your queen or damage your colony. So all I'm doing is lifting them, trying to get a gauge for the weight, and putting fondant on. If you put too much fondant on, it's really not the end of the world. If you put too little fondant on, then there's a risk of them starving. So it's always better to err on the side of putting more fondant on. Now the fondant that I use is is from Baco, so it's a very, very simple fondant. It's just made with sugar and water, and it comes in these quite heavy 12.5 kilo blocks. I'll just put this down. Now, the reason that I'd always go for the Baco fondant is, again, my number one reason for most things, is that it's very, very cheap and it's actually all that the bees need. So it's not me kind of scrimping and getting an inferior product for the bees. The formulation in the Baco fondant is, is all that the bees need in terms of a winter store. They're just looking for calories. There's no requirement for any protein to be in these, so you don't need, say, Candy Pulling Gold, where it's maybe got a little bit of pollen in there, not a huge amount, but you don't actually need any pollen in their winter stores. They should have sufficient pollen within the frames of their hives. So all I use is the Beco Fondant. It comes in a very convenient shaped block as well for National Hive users, so much so that it will fit directly onto the top bars. As it is as a 12.5 kilo block. Now I know a number of beekeepers use different methods for this feeding, so I'm going to give you 2 options here today for how you want to go feed your bees. The first option is going to show you how to apply a whole 12.5 kilo block to your bees directly on the top frames or on top of a queen excluder, and that is in instances where your bees are severely depleted. So this would be for feeding kind of before December. So you're going to have December, January, February, potentially March as well, where there's going to be no incoming food for the bees at all. So I mean, a 12.5 kilo block for them to get through 4 months isn't really that much at all. So that's going to be option 1, and that's probably going to be for people with poly hives as well. I wouldn't necessarily want to treat a colony that's in a wooden hive with a 12.5 kilo block for fear of introducing additional cold. and additional space within the box to keep warm. So that's it, option 1 is going to be for polyhive users feeding a 12.5 kilo block. That's my preferred option and that's what I always do, and my reasoning for that is that if there's anything left at the end, I can just take that off and melt it down and use it for syrup, or more than likely I'll just leave it on and then the bees can use it as kind of like a stimulative feed in the spring as well. So they'll go out, they'll collect water, they'll melt that down, I've never ever got to April and there's been any fondant left, so it's a good way of kind of boosting your spring colonies as well. The second option is I'm going to show you how to add fondant above a crown board. So this would be a crown board with a single hole, and then I'm going to put it into one of these takeaway containers that I get from my local takeaway with lots of lovely Chinese food in them, so they're fully recycled. And this is This is for colonies that you might just want to add it on as a little bit of an insurance. The bees don't have such good access to it, but they do have access to it. It's a central hole, so it will kind of be inverted like that and fill up with fondant, and the bees can kind of access it as they want. The benefit to that is that there's much less interference to the bees, there's much less interference to the space that the bees are operating in, so they're still kind of working within the void that you would normally get within their hive. and then the fondant sits above the crown board. So that's a big benefit. One of the disadvantages is that you probably have to top it up a little bit more because you can only get maybe 1.5 to 2 kilos max in one of these containers. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get the smoker out, I'll cut up some fondant, and we'll take a look in some hives. So all I'm doing here is I'm portioning out the fondant to go into the container. Don't take the blue wrapping off, the blue wrapping can stay on. In some instances I do take it off, but most of the time I just leave it on now, and then I use just kind of a bog-standard knife just to kind of cut straight into it. You need to make sure that you're keeping the mating faces away from each other or it does stick back together again, but you just kind of want to hack it off with a knife and get it into the container. So that's it, so that's what the fondant looks like. It's kind of like a pliable white block. Tastes quite nice. It's what they use to melt down and put on donuts in Greggs, so you can see why the bees like it. That's about the size block you want to get in there. When I'm doing it in the containers, I will take the wrapping off, so I'll go and put that in the recycling centre. And you just want to kind of cram as much as you possibly can into one of these containers. So you can see I can probably get a bit more in there, so I'll hack off some more. So just kind of jam it in. You need to make sure that it's flush with the top, so just push it down. The more you can get in here, the better. It means the fewer times that you're going to need to come back. So you just push it in. Like I say, you need to make sure that it's flush with the top because otherwise there's going to be a gap, then the bees can exit and get into that crown board space, which you don't want. So as you can see there, that is an overwintering colony. Already some remnants of some fondant where I fed that before, and you can probably see that on the top of the other hive, but I just use this for demonstration purposes. So, you know, it's probably covering like 6 or 7 frames there, so I'll be quick and I'll just show you how I do this for option number 1. Option number 1 being using a crown board and just a couple of kilograms of fondant. So I built these crown boards, they're a single bee space on one side, as you can see, single bee space, and then I've used a 10mm ply And cut a central feeding hole out like that. And on the other side, I've got enough space to put a big slab of fondant, but I'll just show you how I do it with the little one here. So you put your crown board directly over the bees like that, and as you can see, you have access directly down into the bees. They've still got a single bee space to move around and come up and access that fondant. Then I take my lump of fondant in a block And I just place that over the bees. Yeah. And that's it. That's pretty much all I do for feeding colonies this way. What I would say, and I haven't got the ability to do this today, is I would try and put something to insulate it in there. So maybe you want to put, depending on the depth that you've got, maybe 25 or 50mm of Celotex. If you cut a board to fit in there and then you cut out the same space as the takeaway cup, you can put that in there and then you're getting really kind of good top insulation on your bees. It's a bit of a belt and braces method, but it works and it's a good way of protecting them from cold, especially when you're adding in additional issues for them to deal with, like kind of coming up and getting the fondant. So I'd always recommend if you're using this method, put additional insulation in, either 25mm or 50mm Celotex, and just cut it to fit on the board. So that's option 1. So option 2, and this is my preferred option, is that we— and you'll see this is kind of— the bees have already done this, so I just— all I have to do is put the queen excluder back on— is just to put the fondant directly onto the bees. Now I know a lot of people lay the fondant directly onto the top bars. Now I really don't like doing that because, as you can see, my top bars, there's a lot of burr comb in there, and it would mean kind of getting in and having to clean them, and I'm just really reluctant to do anything like that at this stage of winter. So what I do is I put a queen excluder directly on top, and then I lay my fondant on top of the queen excluder. So I'll just do that for you now. So there you go, it's as simple as that. Like, um, all I do is I literally just put a big slab of fondant on there like that, um, and then I cover it back up again. Now you'll notice here that I don't have the blue plastic on here. I found that you don't necessarily need to keep the blue plastic on there, but if you want to do it, you can. You can either kind of peel the blue plastic back off the bottom of the fondant and leave it on the top, or you can just put a few slits on the base as well and let the bees kind of access their way up. Either way works. I find where we are in North Wales, you don't need to do that, but I've had a lot of comments from other bee farmers saying it's probably wise to do it. So for the purpose of this video, I would recommend that you leave the blue plastic on. So you'd end up kind of with something like that. That's what it would look like. The bees would have access to the fondant underneath and you'd have blue plastic on the top, and that would be the way I'd recommend to do it. Now obviously this leaves you in a bit of an awkward position here because you can't put the roof back on. So what I've— the system that I've developed, and a couple of bee farmers have adopted this same system and kind of given the information to me, what I actually use Is a Suyanti poly feeder. So when I'm feeding in the winter, these really, really do come in handy. Like, they're absolutely huge. They take 14.5 litres of syrup, so it means when you're doing your winter feeding, you only really need to come once or twice, twice at an absolute maximum, to feed your bees up for winter. But the added benefit is that come— when you come to feed fondant, is that you just invert it and pop it on like that. And although there's a little bit of additional space in there, it's made out of polystyrene, so you've got a lot of insulation kind of already built into that. So that's it, it was, it was pretty simple. Like, I'm going to do that on all my hives now. I'm just going to go around and check. As you can see, this hive here, they've probably only worked through about half of that fondant. I put that on in November, that was a 12.5 kilo block that I put on in November. And they're about halfway through, so they've got 6 kilos left. So the timing's working out pretty well. They've kind of had November, December, January, they've had like 2 and a half months and they've gone through 6 kilos of the fondant, probably had a bit of stores as well. I'm trying to get them through to kind of March, April when I know that the early kind of season nectar is going to start coming in. So it should just be about kind of there or thereabouts with that one. I'll continue to monitor it though. If I come back up in February, obviously I don't want to be coming back up and putting on another whole block, so I'd probably move over to kind of using the crown board method and then just keeping it topped up like that, just to save a bit on the fondant. Obviously don't forget to put your roofs back on. Later on in the season, when I'm trying to build my colonies up as well, what I tend to do is if I come back and there's maybe like 2 or 3 kilos left in March, I might take some pollen supplement, or if you've got natural pollen in your freezer, you can use that as well. I'll take that pollen supplement and I'll kind of sprinkle it on top of the fondant, and then it melts into it a little bit, and you actually— you're not really giving them a pollen patty, but you're just giving them that boost of pollen. It's a really neat place to actually put it for them. It means that they can access pollen without having to fly out and kind of access the early pollen sources, maybe the snowdrops, and that can give the colony a really, really good boost in early spring. So I've got a big bag of pollen sub from Bee Equipment. I'll be using that to kind of top these up later on in the season. I'm very happy with the look of that colony, do you know what I mean? It's kind of middle of January now, it's over 7 frames, which I mean, it's around average. I've got colonies that are bigger than that, I've got some that are smaller than that. If they were all that size, I'd be very, very happy. I'd be very, very surprised if they weren't brooding already. It's been incredibly mild here over the past week the whole winter's been quite mild, but the past 2 weeks it's been kind of 11, 12, 13 degrees in the day. So in the polyhives, I mean, they're going to keep that temperature really nice and constant, and there's definitely going to be brood at this time. So I'm glad that I did my vaping earlier on in the season to keep that mite level really nice and low. So that's it for today's video. I do hope you've enjoyed it. It's another kind of quick and simple video just to show you how to manage your colonies over winter, how to top them up with fondant, and kind of get them through those difficult stages. If you're looking for fondant, please go and speak to your local Baco rep. If they're not willing to talk to you, I suggest go and speak to your local beekeepers association and see if they might do a bundled order where everyone in your local beekeeping association kind of put the money together and go and order these blocks. They're very cheap. This is, this is the thing, I mean, you're looking to kind of pay around £7 or £8 per 12.5 kilo block at the moment. That's direct from Baco, so I mean, some of the manufacturers you see, they're a little bit more than that, but they've got to cover all of their costs and they've got to cover delivery. The big issue with selling this stuff online is the delivery. If you're buying one block, it's 12.5 kilos. Like, it's probably— it's going to cost more for the delivery than it is for the block. Whereas with Bayco, if you order over £150 worth, you get free delivery. So if you club the orders together and you maybe get like 1 or 2 blocks each, it only takes 10 of you to kind of get it up to the numbers where you can get free delivery from Bayko and access the really good prices and savings that you can get through that method. So I hope you've enjoyed the video today. Please subscribe to the channel. Please hit the bell on the home page as well. That means you get a notification every single time we upload a new video. The plan at the moment is still we're going to upload at least 1 video per week. 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