Feeding Colony Long Hive- Hyde Hives Long Hive - Late Summer Feeding

Next up in the Hyde Hives Long Hive series, I'm going to show you how to feed your colonies for winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, following on from the harvesting honey, treating your colonies for mites, I'm going to show you how to get your colonies nice and strong and heavy for winter, feeding them sugar syrup. Now, there's numerous ways to feed your colony to get it strong for winter. And I do appreciate Hyde Hives Long Hive users may not be taking out much, if any, honey at all, so it may be irrelevant to you. If you do take the honey out though, you need to make sure that you're backfeeding with either fondant or sugar syrup to get the colony up to weight. Now with other hives, I always recommend to people take measurements in terms of weights of your hives. With the Long Hive, it's a little bit more difficult, so you do need to err on the side of caution, making sure that your colony has got enough syrup. I'm going to show you though in this video how to feed the colony, get it up to strength, and I'm just going to cover a few differences in terms of the strength and concentration of sugar syrup, when you should use it, and what that's doing to the colony. So I'll jump straight in, I'll get my bee suit on, and I'll show you just how quick and easy it is to feed your colony up for winter. Right, let's get the Hyde Hives long hive fed for winter. Quick recap though, we've taken out any honey that we want to eat. Don't feed your colonies if you're going to take honey out. There's an order to all of this. Build the colonies up, get them strong, take your honey harvest, put your varroa treatments in, and then feed. That's the order. We've already done the first 2 of those videos, taking frames of honey out, adding your Apivar strips, and the final one is adding sugar syrup. That's what we're going to cover in this video. So do a standard one-hand opening of that roof. I say it every time, I love how the roof opens on this. And you can see I've already got set up an English feeder. I don't know who designed these English feeders, and I don't know if they're in collaboration with Hyde Hives— chicken or egg situation— but oh man, these English feeders are the perfect fit for feeding in your long hives. Couldn't get a better fit. The height is perfect for them. They're really big, nice feeders. You've got a lid on because you don't want bees getting up in the roof and then stealing that syrup. It's a really nice simple design. So here's my colony of bees. As you can see, they're doing really, really well. Nice big strong colony of bees. And then you get this central mesh here that I find the bees don't really like that much, and they're constantly trying to remove that or block it up. But they do serve a purpose, and one of them is when you're feeding, you need to take that out. So we're going to pop that out in a little bit, but I'm just going to set it up without popping that out just to show you how it works. Before all the bees come streaming out. So the English feeder from Bee Equipment, I'll stick up a link because I do think these are just perfect for feeding in long hives. You can see it fits perfectly, hardly any space around the edge at all, and the most important thing is that the lid closes. So it's a nice shallow profile but really big capacity feeder, and it's as simple as you like. You just look down there, we're back to that open bit, so the bees are going to have access up through there. And then we'll fill that up with sugar syrup, we'll pop a roof on, and they will take that down so quickly. So when you want to take it out, you can just get your hive tool in underneath like that. That just pops out straight away. Place the English feeder over the top, make sure you can see the bees down there. I can see the bees. Make sure it's nice and central. Make sure this is sitting in the little groove that comes with it, and then you can just go ahead and pour your syrup in. So at this time of year, I'm just using a basic 1:1 sugar syrup. Middle of August at the moment. I've taken off the honey crop. I want to build this colony up, and I'm going to do that by using 1:1 sugar syrup for the first couple of feeds. I'll let the colony get nice and strong, and then I'll come in at the end of the year and I'll do 2:1 syrup feeding when they're going into winter. You can use 2:1 now as well though, it doesn't matter, just a bit of money saving. And I do find you get a little bit of an additional boost because the queen thinks there's a really good flow on, and she'll just boost that laying a little bit going into So fill it up all the way to the top and then we'll get that lid on. So there we go, that's the feeder full. It's at this point of the year you realize how level you've got your hive. Not actually that bad. Obviously over there we still got about an inch and then we've only got half an inch on that side, but that is a huge, huge amount of syrup. Probably going to only need to do that once on the 1:1. That's going to build them up, get them nice and strong, and I'll come back later on in the year, do some proper winter feeding When we get down to 2:1. You can see already though, the bees come in straight up for that. They are going to go all over that sugar syrup. 1:1 for them at this time of year, 2:1 or whatever, any sugar syrup in August, they are going to go wild for it. Probably take that down in about 48 hours. Really important though, and especially important in a long hive, is don't do this without a roof. You get cracks in the long hive when you're doing manipulations, you get bees loitering in the roof. If you don't have a roof on your feeder, you're just going to end up with loads of dead bees in your feeder. So make sure you get the English feeders with the roofs. That's the one you want for feeding in your long hives. Just a final check when you're feeding, just make sure all the crown boards are back on properly. Don't want any gaps in the crown boards either side. Don't want any bees knocking around in the roof. But then the best thing with these English feeders is that there's enough room in the roof for you to close that lid. So you can see it again one-handed. Closes all the way down, that means you're not going to get any wasps, any bees trying to rob that sugar syrup where they shouldn't be. It's nicely hidden away from them. You've got a good capacity sugar syrup feeder, and it's well hidden away from any robbing. And that's it, that's how I feed my colonies for winter in a Hyde Hives long hive. So there we go, simple as that. The colony is now fed, but do not think that is it. Winter feeding does not take place at the end of August and then you're done for the winter. I know it's a bit of a strange one. We talk about winter feeding at the end of August, but we are in the middle of the summer at the moment. And this is why I like to go with this kind of double-pronged approach of taking out the honey, putting in the Apivar, any mite treatment that you're going to use, and then going in with some light 1:1 sugar syrup just to get that colony going again, making sure they've got sufficient food to get them through the end of summer before we even start talking about winter feeding. And you get that double boost as well. The fact that the Apivar doesn't put the queen off lay, She thinks there's a nice big flow going on. She expands that brood nest, nice big strong colony. They'll backfill some of the frames with stores as well. And then when you get into the end of September, early October, that's when you want to be going in, giving them big heavy 2:1 sugar syrup to get them up to weight for winter. So that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that 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.