🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Episode Five – Final Feeding and Weight Judgement

We're on to episode 5 of the Preparing Colonies for Winter series. This episode we're feeding heavy invert sugar syrup. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I hope all of your colonies are looking really, really good going into winter. The colony that we're focusing on in this series, we've been trickle feeding it little and often over the past 6 to 8 weeks. Now they've had their Apivar strips in, the varroa count will be really, really low. The weather has well and truly turned in North Wales. It is cold. I'm going to wear a jumper next episode because it's cold now. Late in the evening, it's about 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening now, I'm in my t-shirt and I'm cold. It's probably no more than 12 degrees. It's been raining all week, and now is the last chance that you've really got to feed heavy syrup to your bees. So I know I've been saying all the way through this series and other series and all the time on my YouTube channel is don't feed your bees heavy syrup too early, but also don't leave it too late. You need to make sure that it's warm enough for the bees to get up into the feeder, access that feeder, and bring it down. It's the 1st of October here, it's cold, the rain's setting in. The bees are looking good because they've been on an Ivy Flow, we've been trickle feeding them, but I'm going to take the final opportunity now to get in there and feed some heavy invert syrup. Now you can feed any sort of invert syrup you like, you can make up your own 2:1 syrup, but I would suggest if you're feeding late, you're going through this process and following the steps on this series and the Making Splits for Winter series, I would suggest trickle feed all the way through middle of August, all the way through September into the first week of October using maybe homemade 1:1 sugar syrup, but then when you flick the switch and you go to heavy syrup feeding, I would suggest go with an invert syrup. And the reason I say that is it's just no work for the bees whatsoever. They go up over a weekend, they'll take all of that syrup, bring it down, and they don't even need to cap it. It's such a low moisture content, it's not going to ferment on the frames, and you're giving the bees a really good head start in terms of the amount of work they need to do to get ready for winter. So that's my suggestion. If you're feeding late on, you're following these steps, go for a proprietary ready-made invert syrup as that final feed. Right, I'm going to get the bee suit on because I want to get on with the video, but also it is cold in North Wales, so I'll get my bee suit on, grab I'll get my smoker on. Let's go and take a look at how the bees are getting on in the Preparing Colonies for Winter series. So first off, it's a really, really good habit to get into when you come up to your colonies late on in the season, especially moving into winter. If you're using ratchet straps, makes it even easier. Give the hive a heft. Now it's so interesting because the series that I'm doing in terms of making splits for winter, that nuc is just over there and I've just shot episode 11 of that one. And the bees are really big, massive, huge, strong colony. They're going through their syrup really quickly, and I'm just doing the heavy feeding video over there, and they're light, very, very light over there. So I filled them up, absolute brimmed them to the top, and I'm going to come back and probably feed them again. We're talking maybe between 10 and 12 kilograms of invert syrup that's going into that nuc to get them up to weight for winter. When I heft these, they're heavy. This colony here has gone out and foraged a lot more than the smaller nuc over there, and it's probably happened early on when the ivy flow was available, the last of the bramble, the last of the clover, when the nuc didn't have enough bees in order to make good use of all of that resource that was available. I'm going to open this up. I'm sure we're going to see lots and lots of bees still covering 10 frames, but I'm not going to feed them a huge amount. And you just need to get into that habit doing the heft because you could come in here And blindly feed them and say, right, it's October, I'm going to feed 2:1, I'm going to stick 10 or 15 litres of syrup in there because that's what's good for bees, more food the better. And it just doesn't work like that. They'll just ignore it because all they're going to do is just take down what they want, just saturate the brood box, and they're just going to block everything off as well. So you just need to make that judgement call. And I think as you move through your beekeeping career, as you kind of get used to what the boxes should be feeling like at certain times of year, You can make that judgment call for yourself, but don't just blindly follow me thinking I was only putting 3 litres of syrup into this colony. You need to go in, you need to feel what they weigh like, and I will cover that on episode 6. So episode 6, I'm going to talk about what the correct weight for winter is, what the target ranges are, and what I like to aim for with my colonies. Let's get inside though, see what the bees are looking like, see how many frames they're over, and then we'll get some syrup onto them And we'll get them ready for winter. So here's my colony of bees, and they're looking really, really nice. I have to say, they are looking good, but they've definitely contracted down a little bit, and that's what happens when you condense them down into a single box like this. But they're well and truly over all 10 frames, no problem with that at all. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take out the Apivar strips, I'm going to scratch those down, I'm going to position those back into the colony And then I'm going to get the feed on. I'm not going to go through the brood because personally I don't really want to go and see what's going on at this stage of the year. Not a huge amount of benefit to be had. I know we've got a queen, I know we've got brood. The bees are doing what I'd expect them to do at this time of the year, which is starting to contract because it's getting colder. They're up to weight, the bees are doing exactly what I need them to do. So there we go, I'm not going to go and take a look at the brood. I was thinking I was going to get in there and take a look for you, but everything's so well sealed up The bees are where I want them to be. They're up to weight. I'm just gonna get the syrup on. And I suggest for you, you don't need to be going into your bees in the first week of October. Any issues should have been sorted long before now. So I've got some invert syrup here. I'm gonna feed them maybe a third of a feeder's worth. That's what I think these guys are gonna need to get up to weight. They'll take it down really, really quickly, especially a big colony of bees like that. Gonna get that straight into the top feeder here. That's probably about 4 to 5 kilograms of syrup that's gone in there. They're going to take that down, fill it into the frames. Doesn't need to be capped because it's such a low moisture content, so it's not going to ferment. And the bees do really well when you use a good invert sugar syrup as that last feed. And there we go, we're nearly there. The bees now have got all of the food that they need. We've treated them for varroa. The colony is naturally contracting down. You don't get to do a huge amount now going forward. There's still going to be a few more episodes in this series though. The next episode is going to be just some weighing. I'm going to get my hive scale out, I'm going to show you how much it weighs, and if we need to top up with a little bit more syrup, we can do that. We're going to come back, take the Apivar strip out, we're going to do some apibioxal vaping as we move into December, and then as we monitor the weight, we might feed some fondant going into January as well. And then hopefully, if we get this colony through, we'll do a final video in the spring just showing how quick these colonies can So there we go, the colony is looking superb. I'm so happy with how they're looking. We've got bees across 7 frames of brood now. I took a quick peek in there because I just wanted to assess the number of frames of brood that are in there. They're on 7 frames of brood, the box is heavy, that's all I need to know. I've dealt with any queen issues earlier on in the year, I've dealt with varroa because I've treated for Apivar. All that's left for me to do now is to come back, Take the Apivar strips out eight weeks after I put them in, and then I'll do some apibioxyl treatment in early December, trying to get that early brood break. And then all I'm going to do is monitor that colony going through the winter, and if needs be, I'll add additional fondant. I hope you found that video useful though. I hope you're finding this series useful as well, and I wish all of your bees the very best of success in getting through winter. 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.