Adam skips the smoker and uses diluted sugar syrup instead to calm bees. He mixes roughly 0.2 kg sugar per 1 L water, adds vinegar or Hivalin to stop fermentation, and sprays it on. The syrup coats their wings and slows them down long enough to open the hive.
Today we're in Adam's apiary and we're learning why he doesn't use a smoker. He uses super diluted sugar syrup. So most beekeepers do use a smoker to try and calm the bees down and make them workable, but Adam has got calm Black Mountain honey, Buckfast bees, and they're pretty calm anyway. But you don't use a smoker, so tell me why you don't use a smoker.
Well, over the, the years I found that when you need to use a smoker, it's It's out, you need to relight it, and then by then the bees have sort of got even more out of hand maybe. Not that I have that very often, but you know, when there's times where it's a bit cooler or the weather's different, a quick blast of very diluted sugar syrup just sort of stops the bees flying and allows you to carry on inspecting.
It's a really nice idea. I've heard of people using sugar syrup, but it's a good point that You light your smoker at the beginning of the day and, you know, you'll go through 3 or 4 colonies and you get to one and it's like, oh, you've got really aggressive bees. And then you go to use it and it's either empty or not lit and you just, you've not got that instant response, have you? But with a sugar sprayer, it's there every time. So I love it. So we're going to go into this colony here, we're going to take a look inside, see if the bees have kind of produced any honey in here. We're going to have a go with the diluted sugar sprayer and see how well it works. So I'm a little bit nervous because he is like full bee suit here at the moment. So one of the things that we didn't talk about in that beginning segment there is the use of plastic frames. So again, we're going to talk about that, wooden or wax versus plastic frames, what's best, areas in the beehive that they're best for. We will cover all of that today. So cool, so they're good.
Yeah.
So this is the 3rd super on top and there's a decent amount of honey in here, isn't there? You've got them drawing them out nicely.
This is probably the strongest one, yeah, and there's probably the most honey on these. I'd say the bottom box is the most empty, but yeah, there's probably some in here I could extract, but Just let them fully cap the lot before I take it off in a one-er.
Cool, right, so before I get stung by these bees, what I'll do is I'll take a frame out, you get your diluted sugar syrup at the ready, and if we need to calm them down, or we'll just give them a spray and see what they do. But let me try and get a frame out and see what these bees are looking like.
They do propolise them quite— oh, okay.
But like, I am impressed. Of course I'd say I am impressed, but They're nice calm bees. There's not a huge amount of bees up in this super here, but they've been up here before, haven't they? There's a lot of honey. That is a nice full frame there, frames and feeders frames. So go on, how would you use it and how would you mix it and how would you make it up first? Talk to me about that.
So when I'm mixing batches of syrup for feed in drums, 1 to 1, 1 kilo of granulated sugar to to water. I'd then fill sort of a bottle, maybe a fifth full, and then top the rest up with water.
Oh wow, so it's like, what's that ratio going to be? It's going to be like 0.2 to 1?
Yeah.
Super, super diluted.
Yeah, and then it, sorry, it just gives them enough on the wings to stop them from flying. If it was just pure water, I think they'd probably, you know, especially on a hot day, it would evaporate and then they'd be straight up. It just keeps them, you know, down a little bit longer so you can get into the box.
I like it. And you make up like a fresh batch every inspection?
Yeah, it's got, uh, Hivalivin, so it sort of doesn't go off. Either that or vinegar, organic cider vinegar, that stops it sort of going mouldy. But you do get through a good amount if you're going through a full inspection anyway.
Nice. Well, it doesn't look like these bees are going to play ball and get really angry with us, but I'm keen to see kind of like the sugar syrup. Let's have a look at it. So you keep it in. They almost did that on demand there, didn't they? It was just a little movement and they fancied having a go. But it's got like a nice sprayer there and you can see just sprays out nicely. And I got a bee by my head there. Let's see if we can kind of get that.
No.
Just having a little play with it. It does seem to work. We need almost like a big colony where they go up to give it a go. So you can instantly see when he sprays there, the bees, they kind of hunker down a little bit and there's nowhere near as many bees flying up. And you're right, it just coats the wings a tiny bit there, like you can see, with that really fine sugar syrup to stop the bees flying up. I think it's a really nice idea. I think it may be something that I'll keep in my apiary just to use as a backup in case the bees get really, really angry. I've given you a few super close-ups there, and as you can see, as that sugar syrup is sprayed out, the bees get a really fine Fine misting, a fine coating of sugar on their wings, which means that they're unable to fly up immediately. The benefit of the sugar syrup versus the water, as Adam says, is that once the water evaporates, they're able to fly again. With the sugar, it takes them just a little bit more time to be able to get that off. All the bees have got to go in and clean them. Also probably calms them down a little bit. You know how you get a flow, calms them down. I think the presence of sugar there will certainly calm these bees down. And you can see they're kind of busy mopping up all of that sugar syrup on there now as well, aren't they? So brilliant tip, I love a tip. Plenty more videos to come. Definitely hit the subscribe button. We're gonna move on to the next video.
