🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Episode Four – Trickle Feeding and Brood Assessment

We're on to episode 4 of the Preparing Colonies for Winter series, and we are well and truly in the trickle feeding phase. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mancin' Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We have moved into the trickle feeding phase at the moment, first week of September. It's gone a little bit grey, and all we're doing with our colonies at the moment is we're going back in. I do this weekly, But if you've got a colony, it's best to do this every 2 or 3 days, giving them 1 or 2 litres of 1:1 sugar syrup. We just keep on going. You keep on going and keep on doing this. And I've covered this in other videos as well, but the reason that you don't want to go in and just pump them full of, say, 15 litres of 2:1 sugar syrup at this time of the year, you might think, well, there's loads of bees there, I need to give them their winter feed. It's still September, it's still summer. There's still the ivy flow, the bees are still active, they're bringing in pollen. They've not even got to the point where they're rearing their winter bees yet. So don't feed them for winter because it's not wintertime yet. And I see it a lot on Facebook, and I see people going on with big massive feeders and just pumping them full of 2:1. And I just think it's a bit early to be pumping them full of 2:1. You're much better off at this time of year, especially if you've got them in your garden or somewhere where you can go in regularly, stick to 1:1 sugar syrup because it's cheaper. And it helps that colony expand into the winter. And just do it little and often, 1 litre, 2 litres every couple of days. They'll keep on taking it down. You don't need to go and inspect the colony at this time of year. You don't need to go in and look inside it. I'm going to show you inside it this time because I've not actually showed you the brood nest in this colony yet. So I'll get in there, I'll pull it apart, I'll show you the different stages. And what I'm going to hopefully show you is the fact that there's not a huge amount of stores in there. Now, whatever you do, do not let your colony starve at this time of year. Always err on the side of putting a little bit too much syrup in, but don't fill every single frame with syrup. If you go through the colony and 8 out of the 10 frames are full of syrup, it's not right. That's not what they should be looking like at this time of year because the flows are still going to go on. You're still going to get the late ivy flow. That's going to mean that the queen wants to expand that colony. And when I say expand the colony, I mean lay some frames of brood. So at the moment they might be on a brood break, and the last thing you want to do on a brood break is backfill everything up with syrup. You need to ensure that the queen has got sufficient space to lay the winter bees when the queen wants to lay her winter bees. And then as soon as you go back in and you're seeing 8 frames of brood and it's September, middle of September, back end of September, soon as you get to that point, then you just go wild with the 2:1 and you can put 15 litres on in one go, and they'll probably take it down over the course of 3 or 4 days. You can go back on and put it on again. You can pump them full of 2:1 at that point in the year, and they'll take it down so, so quickly. But we're still at the stage, especially in North Wales, and it will differ from where you are throughout the country. If you're on the South Coast, very, very different to if you're up in Scotland. You need to kind of judge where you are for yourself, and I've made a very specific choice not to put any dates on these videos because what's suitable for me in North Wales just isn't suitable for people on the South Coast. Isn't suitable for people in Scotland, but the process is very, very similar in terms of you get to the point where you're going to harvest your honey, you move into varroa treatments, you move into like a trickle feeding stage where you're just treading water. You want the colony to maintain that brood nest size, and then all of a sudden you go into winter bees and the queen will build a really good strong nest of winter bees. You'll see lots of frames of brood, and it's at that point you want to go heavy on the 2:1. So enough of me talking, let's jump in, let's take a look at how this colony is getting on, and I'll continue with my trickle feeding. Right, let's get inside this colony then and see how we're getting on. I've not even opened the colony yet and they're already after me. I'm afraid September beekeeping isn't the most fun at all, especially the first few weeks of it. Once you've taken the honey off colonies, you do it in a whole apiary, they immediately go on the rob. So they can smell the sugar syrup on me, so they're trying to rob the sugar syrup from me, and they're also horribly aggressive as well. So it's about 6 o'clock in the evening here today, it's relatively cool, so I'm fully expecting I'm going to get battered. So I'm glad I got my ultra suit on. Don't worry about it though, you don't need to be going into your colonies this time of year. All of my other colonies, all I do, take the lid off, top the syrup up, put the lid back on, and that's it, I'm done. And they tend to be okay with you doing that. I'm going to show you some of the frames in this colony though, just to show you what they're doing inside. Because I think it's important to have a look and an understanding of what they're doing with that brood nest and how not to clog it with too much syrup. We want to see some space, we want to see a light amount of stores, we want to see some brood. Okay, we want to see the queen, we want to see some eggs, that'd be nice as well, but you really don't need to see any of that at this time of the year. Just play the waiting game, trickle feeding, getting them to a point, so mid to late September, What you want to see in mid to late September is maybe 6 or 7 frames of brood as a minimum, and then you can start pumping them full of 2:1 syrup. Let's get inside though, hope I don't get too badly battered. Right, so I often get asked, how do you get your colonies boiling like this? And this is certainly one way of doing it, is condensing down 4 National Deeps into a brood box like this. But oh my God, they're stinging my gloves as I talk. But you can just see, look how many bees are in this box. Do not think this is too many bees. Do not think, oh, they've not got enough space in there, I'm going to give them another box. This is what you want to see— super congestion. And it serves 2 purposes. One, they're able to maintain their heat really well because there's a lot of them. They just turn on the air conditioning and they sort themselves out really, really well. But 2, and the main one at this time of year, is going back to episode 2. What's that? Those apivar strips, they work by bees walking over them and then them coming into contact with other bees. And by having them super congested like this, seem to get a really, really good effective mite drop because of the congestion. Now the bees will just work that out themselves. There's not been actually too much bearding in this colony at all, and it's because we're on a 14 by 12. There's quite a lot of space in there for them to cluster down. But yeah, I wanted to open this one up and, and show you The amount of bees that are actually in there, just don't think that this is a bad thing, because you could see this and just think there's not enough space, I'm going to give them a super, or I'm going to double brood them, and that's just the wrong move at this time of the year. Condensing them down into a single box is a really good move, and if you're going to go on double brood, then fine, you stay on double brood, you stay on it pretty much throughout the whole of the season, and then you're using a slightly different method, and they'll start in the bottom box, stores above them, and then they'll move up to the top box over winter. But what we're doing here is a single box management, condensing them down, getting them ready for winter. So I think you'll agree that is a very, very congested box, and I just wanted to show you that again, talk about it a little bit more, because this is what I find gives me such good overwintering performance. The queen in there, she wants to lay 10 frames of brood From one side to the other. She's got the bees in there in order for her to do that very, very late on in the year. Because there's so many bees in there, they can keep the temperature up. They're in a polyhive as well, so the polyhive definitely helps that. So if you're in, say, November and you've got 10 frames of brood in November as your winter bees, I personally think you've got a much better chance of coming out of April with a colony intact. Whereas if you're in November and you've got 3 frames of brood and you're only over 6 frames of bees, I don't think you stand quite as good a chance. And it's just my interpretation of it. I've always been taught go into winter with the biggest, strongest colonies you can possibly have. Might cost you a little bit more in food, trickle feeding, and fondant, but the success rate of getting them through I find is a little bit better. I'm going to get in here now, going to get absolutely battered, I'm going to get stung on the hands, But I'm going to show you some of the frames. I'll start at the back, I'll work to the front. Hopefully we're going to see a good mix of stores and quite a lot of frames of brood as well. So it's quite difficult getting the frames out and not getting battered, but here you go. Here is one of the brood frames, and you have to look through all of the bees that are on it as well, but that is pretty much full to the brim with brood. Brood. They're backfilling a lot of that space with nectar as well, so I'm going to slow down a little bit with the trickle feeding because like I said before, it's all a balancing game. You can go in, you can heft your hives, you don't want them too heavy too early, and this one here, we're probably a little bit too heavy. I've already got 3 fully capped frames of stores out of the 10, and then going through the frames, I've got 7 frames of Brood. This one here is pretty indicative of what the frames of brood look like. Got a little bit of stores around the edge, not that you can see through all of those bees that are there. So I'm just going to hang it back a little bit. I'm going to reorganize, I'm going to centralize the brood nest into the middle, and then I'll go very, very light in terms of trickle feeding. So I'm not going to go through every single frame because there's just too many bees here, and I Do not want to damage the queen, and this is why I recommend for you, don't go through your frames at this time of the year. If you knock your queen off, then you're really going to struggle because you're very unlikely to get any emergency cells mated, and you're going to struggle to get a mated queen as well. So I'm going to stop there. I've got 7 frames of brood, 3 frames of stores. I'm going to rejig it about so I've got the frames of stores to the outer edge, brood nest in the middle, I'm going to reposition my Apivar strips. That's really important that if you do go in and you check where the brood is, make sure that your Apivar strips are fully located within that brood nest. And then I'm going to close them up. I'll give them, say, half a litre of syrup, something really light just to keep them ticking over. And then I'll come back in a couple of weeks and hopefully we can move on to real heavy feeding for winter. So there we go. Do not be put off by the temperament of your bees this time of the year. They're saying, get away from my winter feed. This is not what you want to be doing. You don't need to open up your colonies at this time of the year. I love going around feeding colonies at this time of the year because you just don't need to go and open them up. Doing this just to show you how many bees are in that small box there, and also a state of what it's looking like inside. I'm going to come back in towards the end of September and I'm going to reevaluate, and we'll look at this colony again. And you would see that the colony would have shrunk down a little bit. Few of those bees would have died off, and hopefully we'll start to see a little bit more brood coming into it as well. Nice big frames of brood into the winter bees, and then we can backfill with 2:1 syrup. Hope you enjoyed that video though. I hope you found it useful, and I hope you're getting your colonies prepped and ready for winter. If you've got any questions on winter prep, just stick it in the comments. I'll do my very best to answer them all. But 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.