In this No Nonsense Beekeeping episode, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how to use baker’s fondant as an inexpensive, year‑round insurance feed for nucleus colonies (nucs). He explains why fondant is preferable to syrup for a quick, low‑maintenance supplement, especially in early October, and how it can be added directly into the BS Honeybee poly‑nuc feeder after removing the syrup plug. Edwards walks through selecting a cheap baker’s fondant slab (≈4 kg per cut), cutting it to fit the feeder, gently inserting it without harming the queen, and resealing the nuc. He notes that bees readily consume and store fondant, converting it into liquid feed, and that a £2‑£3 slab can provide an extra 4‑8 weeks of survival during winter starvation. The video also covers practical tips—monitoring consumption, avoiding over‑feeding syrup, and when the method is appropriate (few nucs, not all hives). Overall, the tutorial offers a simple, cost‑effective strategy to boost nuc resilience throughout the season.
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Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to take a look at how you feed fondant late in the season. So we're not doing this as a winter feeding video. I'm going to show you this now. I'm in the first week of October and I'm going to show you how to add fondant specifically to nucleus colonies as an insurance policy. Now the reason I do this, and you might just think, why don't you feed them up to weight with syrup? And the answer to that is I do feed them up to weight with syrup, but then the way that the nucleus colonies are kind of set up in the nucs that I keep, it's so easy just to add a slab of fondant on top of them. And now you can put like a kind of a piece of queen excluder over the top that fondant or underneath the fondant to stop it all dripping through, but in my experience it doesn't really drip through that much, and anything that does drip through, the bees take care of. But all you're doing there is you're giving yourself, for the sake of maybe £2 or £3, an insurance policy for starvation and for isolation starvation. By putting that fondant directly on top of the colony, they've always got access to it as and when they need it. The other thing I want to point out in this video as well is that you can just feed your colony on fondant all the way throughout the year. So for spring buildup, they'll take fondant down, they'll take water, they'll break it down into something that they can use to rear brood. Late on in the season, I've done this a couple of years ago and it worked really, really well. You can just feed big slabs, 12 kilogram slabs of fondant. So I'll post up a picture and show you exactly what I mean. I was giving each colony kind of 2 of those from September onwards, and they just took them down. It disappeared in no time at all. So if anyone says to you that bees don't store fondant, not true. Bees will definitely store fondant. I've seen it in the frames myself. They will take that down. They're probably going to break a lot of that down with some liquid and then store it as a liquid feed that they do themselves. So it's a little bit more work for them. And then anything that they don't use, you just leave on top of the colony and And that's your insurance policy. So in this video, going to be a really, really quick and simple video, just going to show you how to cut up that fondant, how to place it onto the colony so they can access it well. And that's it, it's as simple as that. Nothing complex, nothing fancy here, just cutting up a big slab of fondant and sticking it on your nucs early in the year. So we do this around October time, and then you can monitor the amount of fondant that's on that colony all the way throughout the year. And if they need more, just chuck another slab on. You really can't overdo it with fondant like you can with syrup. If you overdo the syrup, obviously they fill everything out. If you overdo it with fondant, they just tend to leave it above them because they see it as another area of stores. So I'll get my bee suit on, we'll open up a couple of nucs, and I'll show you how to add the fondant to them. Right, so when it comes to feeding your colonies early fondant for winter, this is the way you do it, and I highly recommend BS Honeybees poly nucs. They make it so easy to feed fondant, and they make it easy just to kind of get that fondant in nice and early in the season, so you haven't got to worry about it, and you're using it as an insurance policy. So I'm going to show you how to add that fondant now. So take your roof off. Really, really strong colony here. You've got a fondant plug like that that sits in the feeder here. So when you're feeding syrup, you have a plug in it like that. Now for fondant feeding, you take that plug out and just keep it somewhere safe. So then you've got a hole, effectively you've got a hole like you would have, say, maybe a hole in your crown board, and then you could just put the feeder back on the top. Obviously being really, really careful not to squish the queen. Just do a bit of a check, check underneath. Just want to check as best as you can you're not going to hurt the queen this time of year, and then you just want to place that feeder back on top. Then you want to take a nice big massive chunk of baker's fondant. So you can use kind of one of the, the brands, so like a kind of an Happy Pasta or an Happy Fondant. I like the baker's fondant though because it's cheap, you can get loads of it on there. So then I just do a big cut like that. That's probably about 4 kilos of fondant there, and I keep the plastic on that side to keep it nice and moist and fresh. And then all I do is I just place that down into the gap. The bees will come up. Just want to be gentle with it and massage that in just so you can get the roof back on. The idea really with this is kind of fill that void. I find the big slabs of baker's fondant, if you just cut them into 3, they fit really nicely into the BS Honeybees feeders like this. And then that's it, stick the roof back on and your colony's set there. So do you mean I fed that colony up? If I'm going to lift them up here— wow, they are so heavy! They've got stores in there, stores in there. But what I've done is I've added some additional stores So instead of kind of continuing feeding them syrup where you could block out all of the cells and then they might think there's something wrong with the queen, you're just putting that extra layer of feed, solid feed, at the top where the cluster is going to end up later on in the year once they've used up all of the feed here and they've moved all the way up. And they're going to get up there and they're going to be like, oh my God, this is amazing, we've got 4 kilos of extra feed that we didn't know we had, we're not going to die, we're not going to kind of, uh, die over winter, we've got a chance to survive. Now sure, you can put that in in December, it makes no difference. So sticking it in there early, the bees do not care. They'll come up on warm days, they'll feed on it, they'll take that fondant down and store it as well. They will store fondant. You can just feed your colonies fondant exclusively, um, but it's just, it's a really good insurance policy. That piece of fondant there, £3. And it's probably going to give me maybe 6 to 8 weeks extra before the bees die due to starvation. Now obviously, if you feed them up correctly with the correct amount of syrup, you're not going to be in that— like, you're not going to have that problem. But for the sake of £3, to have an insurance policy of maybe kind of like between 4 and 8 weeks of additional time to get in there and give them some feed, why would you not just stick a slab of fondant in like that? So if you've got the time to kind of go there all the time and kind of check on your nucs, then you don't need that and you don't need to do it. And I'm not saying everyone needs to go and stick a big slab of fondant above your nucs or above your hives as an insurance policy. I'm definitely not saying that, and that's not something that I do. I'm just saying if you want to do that, this is how you do it. And on my big ones like this, I find they can get through their feed quite quickly, so if I've got some spare fondant lying on I just stick it on there. They keep it nice and warm, and it's there for when they need it. So there we go. It's a really quick, really simple method of adding fondant to your nucs. And the reason I've specifically done this video and kind of do it a little bit different to the previous videos I've done on adding fondant is to say that you really can do this early in the season. Don't see it as a December, January thing only, although that's mostly when kind of I would recommend feeding fondant. But just if you've got BS Honeybee nucs with the hole, with the plug, just stick it on. There's nothing wrong with getting a bit of fondant in there, it gives you that insurance policy. I wouldn't recommend doing it to all of your hives. If you've got numerous hives, loads of nucs, you don't necessarily need to do this. If you've got 2 or 3, for the sake of tenner or 20 quid for a big block of fondant, why not just chop it up, stick it on, and then you can monitor the colony by how far they're going through the fondant. So that's it for the video. 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.
