In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards explains why March is a critical month when many bee colonies die from starvation despite appearing healthy. He demonstrates how to add fondant feed to a long hive, detailing the steps: opening the hive, repositioning the crown board so a central hole aligns over the bee cluster, cutting an access hole in a block of Honeybee Pro fondant, placing the fondant, and optionally adding insulation. Edwards emphasizes that the large volume of a long hive makes over‑feeding unlikely, allowing beekeepers to provide 1–2 kg of fondant safely. He advises regular monitoring every one to three weeks (or weekly) to assess consumption, perform inspections for queen and brood health, and add more fondant or other feeds such as pollen patties if needed. Unused fondant can be removed at season’s end. The video also references a longer playlist for more detailed long‑hive management.
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In this video, I'm going to show you how to add fondant to your long hive to make sure that your bees don't starve in March. March is the time of the year when most bee colonies die. It kind of feels a little bit wrong, doesn't it? Because it feels like it's spring, there's flowers out, the days are getting warmer, you see big boxes full of bees and you think the queen's in there, she's rearing brood, they're bringing in pollen, everything is good. But do not let the weather and the conditions and the state of the hive lull you into a false sense of security. March is when most colonies die because they burn through their stores at such an incredibly rapid rate. I've had it previously where you think a colony's big and strong and you don't need to do anything, and then sadly they've died in March because they've starved and completely run out of stores. The weather can turn, it's still winter, it looks sunny at the moment but you might get a really long cold snap still to come in March and even into April. So in this video I'm just going to show you how to add fondant onto your long hives. They make it so easy to add the fondant on and I just think the fact that the long hive is so big There's so much space in the long hive, it's very, very difficult to overfeed them, especially if you're only giving them kind of like 1 or 2 kilos of fondant at a time. So I've already got this long hive set up with some feed on. I'm going to open it up now, show you exactly what I mean. So it's as simple as this with a long hive. You've got your clear polycarbonate boards, you can see where that cluster is. All you need to do, pop out the central hole like that, rearrange the crown board so this central open hole is completely over the bee cluster there. And then you just wanna take a piece of fondant. You can cut it yourself, you can buy it fresh. This is Honeybee Pro that we've had for a good year now, so we're just getting around to using it. I'll open this up now and I'll show you the access the bees have into this. But I've only cut a hole that's about this big here. The bees will work up, work through it as and when they need it. And this late on in the year, you can add the insulation back in. You can see a little bit of insulation flying around there, just to cover and cozy it up. But I'm not gonna do that 'cause I don't want the bees getting wrapped up in any of the insulation. If you really wanted You could cut yourself a crown board quilt out of Celotex or Kingspan or something like that, but the days are getting milder now, the colonies are getting bigger, the roof isn't too bad for insulation anyway, so I'm just going to leave mine like this. Open it up underneath though, you can see the bees are up, they're working on that fondant. I'm going to put it back over them now because I don't want to crush them, but as you can see, it's only a small hole there. This colony over here, exactly the same. We've only got a few weeks now until we're going to take that off, but just don't be fooled. Bees will use an incredible amount of fondant going into the winter. They'll burn through those stores, and I'd prefer to have them slightly overfed in a long hive compared to dead. So I'm going to leave that fondant on for kind of 3 or 4 weeks now. I'm going to leave it on until I can actually get in there and do some beekeeping inspections, get out the frames, check for queens, check for eggs, check for space and expansion. But as I said, in a long hive you've got so much surplus space in terms of frames the chance of overfeeding is very, very slim indeed. Any fondant that they don't use, I'll just remove and discard at the end of the year, but I'll keep on coming back every couple of weeks now, maybe even every week, just to check and see how they're getting on with that fondant. If they're working through it at a rate of knots, then I'll potentially add some more. And if you want to feed them, say, pollen sub or pollen patties or anything like that as well to boost them, for whatever reason you want to boost them, not something that we do, you can feed them in exactly the same way. We've done loads of videos on our long hives. I really enjoy working them. If you want to know more, check out this link here for our full long hive playlist.
