🐝 Hefting Beehives and Adding Fondant for Emergency Feeding in Winter

In this video, I'm going to show you how I heft my beehives and how I add fondant if the bees need it. So at this point of the year, back end of Jan, early Feb, I'm going up every single week and I'm hefting every single hive. I just go up to the hive, it's already strapped up, I'm lifting it up from the base, and I get a general feel as to how heavy the colony is. Almost impossible for me to teach you that via a video, but I would say it's more trial and error Do as many as you possibly can and always err on the side of caution. If you think it's feeling light, you need to add some fondant. So when I'm going into my colonies, all I'm doing is I'm just lifting them up from the back, and that one there is jam-packed full of stores still, really, really nice and heavy. This one over here is double brood configuration, that one's even heavier. I need to go and find one in this apiary that's a little bit light, and then I'll show you how I put my fondant on. Right, so this one here is probably the lightest in the apiary. I wouldn't feed this one unless I was doing the video, but I just want to show you how I'm popping that fondant on. But as I said before, err on the side of caution. Pack of fondant or a section of fondant is going to cost you like £2 or £3, gives you that insurance policy, and it means that the bees are always going to have something to eat. And it's not really kind of too detrimental if the bees don't eat it. You can just scrape it off at the end of spring, turn it into 1:1 sugar syrup, or do what I do and just leave it on the bees and they will take it down eventually. So I know I'm a one-trick pony. I know I talk about preemptive Demarais and polyashforth feeders, but I only go on about them so much because they've transformed my beekeeping. Polyashforth feeders give you amazing insulation, and it means that this is how easy it is to set up your colony to get some fondant on. So this is the fondant that I'm using at the moment, Honeybee Pro. Only reason I'm using this fondant is because I've got some of it left over. I don't buy into the fancy fondant hype. I just use Baco fondant and cut it up into sections. All of these fondants are going to be good to feed at this time of the year. Don't need the ones with vitamins, don't need the one with protein. That's just my opinion, but definitely don't want to give your colonies too much protein at this time of year. So this is just a standard carbohydrate-based sugar fondant. So this comes in kilogram packs. You can get them in 2 kilogram packs as well. And I would say towards this point of the year, if you're feeding and you're using the big Baco 12.5 kilogram slabs, you want to go into sixths. That's what I would go into. So just over 2 kilograms each, I think it's 2.5 kilograms maybe, something like that. Chop it into 6 equal pieces. Don't worry about the shape of it, the bees really don't mind. And when you're using the polyash forth feeder, you've got loads of headroom and you've got insulation all around. So all I've done is I've taken off the roof and I've got my polyash forth feeder here. Little close-up into what that looks like. Still got a little bit of condensation, bit of remnants and feeding in there, Don't worry about that, the bees won't mind that. Any syrup, they'll just clean up. The beauty of this system is that you never take your polyasphalte feeder off the hive. It means that you're containing any issues with disease within that colony. So if you do find disease, very, very easy to deal with. So what we're going to do, we're going to lift up that polyasphalte feeder, get that fondant on, and close everything back up again. But that's the starting format. So floor, National Brood Box 14 by 12, Then into my polyash forth feeder. So it's always fun doing beekeeping videos this time of year. You don't know how many bees are in the colony. Could be dead, could be overflowing, could be gentle, could get absolutely battered. So always exciting. I can hear a roar. And there we go, lots and lots of bees. Super big colony of bees. People always say to me, how do you get your colonies of bees so big? Not going to cover that in this video, but have a little snoop around the channel. There's lots of tips to get your colonies big and strong like this. Right, so I've got a few bees checking me out. As you can see, massive density of bees. I've noticed a schoolboy error on this one. I've actually left an Apivar strip in. Really gutted about that. So I'm going to get that Apivar strip out now. But there we go. I reckon I'm going to say that that colony of bees is completely full. Yeah, 12 frames, 14 by 12, massive cluster of bees. And the easiest way in the world to make sure they've got enough food. So I've changed a lot of the genetics in this apiary, and I'm not being stung. I've got a few flyers. I had one that had a little go at me, and I just batted it away, and it's not come back yet. But they're really nice and calm and gentle, and it is a bit cheating. Like, this time of the year, you never get horrible vicious bees. So we will see how they progress throughout the season. But how easy is this? I'm going to take my block of fondant, and I'm just going to very gently rest it on the bees. Now that will not crush the bees, they will just move out the way of it. And then all that's left to do is to take my polyash forth feeder and to turn it the other way round, encapsulate it in that nice insulating material, strap everything back up again. It does not get much easier than this. So there's my fondant in position. The bees will just start working through that now. They love a bit of fondant at this point in the year. They'll work through it. Anything they don't work through, I'll get rid of that at the end of the season, end of the spring I mean. And then this colony can go into the season as strong as they like. I really hope all of my colonies are quite as strong as this. So one really important thing to note when you're putting the lid back on is that on the other side, you've got the plastic bit still in and you've got all these bees on the top there. So what could happen if you just put it back on inverted, all of those bees would get blocked. So you can either tap them back in or really simply you just take out the plastic divider and then put it back like that. And all of those bees on the top will work their way down because it's so well insulated. They're just moving around. You can see it's not a strong cluster at all. All of those bees there are going to happily move back down now that I've taken the divider out. So place my polyashforth feeder back on like that. The divider's out, those bees will go back down, and that is how I feed fondant using the most versatile piece of equipment in the world, the polyashforth feeder.