🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Episode Three – One To One Feeding Strategy Explained

We're on to episode 3 of preparing colonies for winter, and we are now into 1:1 sugar syrup feeding. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We've condensed the colonies down to a single box, we've treated them for varroa, and now we're into 1:1 sugar syrup feeding at the back end of August. Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail on the difference between 1:1 sugar syrup and 2:1 sugar syrup feeding at this time of year, I've covered that on separate videos. My process though, once I put the Apivar strips in, back end of August, first week of September, I do a couple of rounds, little bit of trickle feeding with 1:1 sugar syrup. Idea with that is that it gives the colony enough food to survive. It also simulates a flow, gets that brood nest expanding, and then going to go back in at the end of September, even into early October, and then I'm going to use 2:1 sugar syrup to get the colony up to Like I said, we've covered that all in separate videos. Let's get straight into the colony now, get them fed with 1:1 sugar syrup. Right, let's get this colony fed using 1:1 sugar syrup as a late summer, early autumn trickle feed. As I said before, if you're going to do all of these in a day, you can do episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 in a single day. That is, take away all your honey, compress them down to a single box, put your Apivar strips in there, and feed them syrup. You can do that all on day 1. As long as you've got good weather. If you've not got good weather, the polyashworth feeder gives you a little bit of time for them to work on that fondant, and it means you can wait for a good period of weather. As you condense them down, the colony is just going to start contracting and contracting because there's not going to be enough space for them to expand until you start to give them a little bit of sugar syrup. This is the point though where you're almost certainly going to see some bearding, so don't jump into feeding any sugar syrup. Turning that polyashworth feeder the other way up if the weather is bad, Just wait. You need a good 3 or 4 day dry spell to hopefully avoid any bearding on that colony. So let's jump straight in, get the colony fed. So this is what you're likely going to see on this day. Lots and lots of bees. Often find that you see bees clustering up there as well. Doesn't matter. This is a good thing. Don't think at this point, oh, they need, they need a super or they need another brood box. I see it so often, people building their colonies up, trying to put them on double brood going through the winter. And you don't build your colonies up in August. Don't go double brood in August. It's way too late for that. This is a good thing. What you're seeing here is good. Congestion is good. Bearding is good. Means you're going to get a really good mite drop, and it means that they're going to be able to regulate their heat throughout winter. So you can take your polyashforth feeder off if you're using a polyashforth feeder. Forgot to say, if you've not got a polyashforth feeder and you want to do this without it, you can just use an empty Super, works just as well. Empty super, no problem at all. But then obviously when you come to feed, you need to take that super off, get them all underneath your crown board, and then feed above the crown board. But the next stage of the process, again, really simple. Take your fondant off, shake off all the bees. You'll be amazed that if they were short on stores after a couple of days, how quickly they'll work through a couple of kilos of fondant. Make sure all of your Apivar strips are perfectly still in position, and then you want to take your Ashforth feeder, Tap all of the bees out the inside, and then get that directly onto the brood box. So just making sure the apivar strips are properly in the position, clear off the edges, and then straight on with your Ashford feeder. And you will—you'll have so many bees flying around at this point. They're thinking, right, we have not got enough space to get back into our beehive now. This is the process that I've done for about four or five years now, and every single time I've done it, I've had very, very good overwintering. So now you want to get your sugar syrup in there. We're using 1:1 sugar syrup because we want to simulate a flow. We want to keep that queen going. We don't want the brood nest to contract down too early, and we don't want to backfill all of that space in the brood box with syrup. If you do that, then you're restricting the size of the colony, and it'll go from a big massive colony to nothing within the space of about 4 or 5 weeks. You want to prolong that process Keep the bees active over the next 4 to 6 weeks, and then once you've got a nice big strong colony and you're towards the back end of September, then you can just fill that polyash forth feeder there with 14 litres of 2:1 syrup. They'll take it down over a weekend, and then your colonies are pretty much sorted going into winter. Let's get the 1:1 syrup in here now. Again, we're talking trickle feeding at this point. Less is more. You want to go for like 2 or 3 litres maximum at this point. 1:1 sugar syrup, do it every other day. Every single time they take down 2 or 3 litres, come back in 3 or 4 days later, give them a little bit more. You just want to keep on topping them up over the next couple of weeks. So there's nothing special added to this. This is just 1:1 sugar syrup, plain white granulated sugar, water, mixed while it's warm to a nice clear syrup and then cooled down straight onto the feeders. Be really careful not to splash it. It's a big colony. It can protect itself from wasps, but you don't want to give the wasps any invitation to get in there and get that syrup. If you do make any spills, mop them up straight away. Don't give the wasps a chance to take hold because they would decimate colonies late on in the year. So this is what the feeder's looking like. Couple of bees in there, but as you can see, not that much syrup. Gone for about an inch, probably talking two or three liters of syrup in there. If I zoom in, really difficult with that glare there, but that is. Full to the brim with bees now. They're going to come down, they're going to start feeding on that syrup, they are going to absolutely love that. They will clear that within about 24 hours and then we can come back and feed them some more. So this is important all the way throughout the year, but really important when you're getting the colonies ready for winter. Make sure there's no gaps leading into the hive, leading into the feeder. You need to give them a nice, safe, secure place. You don't want them battling wasps at this time of the season. Wipe up any spills, make sure there's no cracks, get your ratchet straps nice and tight. And there we go, we're pretty much done. Really good with this colony. The size is just about right in that they're not bearding that much. This one here was a late requeened colony, so it wasn't anywhere near as big as some of my other colonies. Believe me, on some of my colonies, if you did this manipulation here, you would have like watermelon-sized clusters hanging out the front, but I'd Just say again, just trust the process. Bearding at this time of the year, as long as it's not rainy, that will subside in a matter of days, if not a week or so. And then you've got the perfectly congested brood box that works for the varroa treatment, gets the colony really nice and strong going into winter. And that's it, they're all fed. We can come back now every 2 or 3 days, up to about 4 or 5 day intervals. Keep on topping them back up with that syrup. You only want to do that for about 2 or 3 weeks, and then on episode 4, we will get in there and I'll show you the state of the colony. I'll show you the queen, I'll show you what the brood's looking like, I'll show you how well they've adapted to that space, and I'll just give you a rough general feeling of how the colony's looking going into September and moving into real winter feeding. So there we go, simple as that. It's at this point in your preparing colonies for winter where you will get bearding outside of the front. Make sure you do this and time it with a good spell of weather. If it's not going to be done with a good spell of weather, then you either need to think about double brooding that colony, delaying it by feeding fondant for a little bit longer, because otherwise you're going to have issues with big amounts of bearding outside the front of the colony. You're not going to get an effective varroa treatment if they're all bearding outside the front, and then if it rains, you're going to wash away half of your colony. So timing is key. You need to do this when the weather is looking good. But a colony that size will suck down 5 or 6 litres of syrup in a matter of hours. You want to trickle feed here. Don't just fill it up with 15 litres of syrup because then it's completely defeating the purpose of feeding them 1:1. They'll take that 1:1 and they'll just store it somewhere. You want to take it down, you want to simulate a flow, you want to get that queen back onto the brood laying. And then once the colony's nice and big and strong, covering all of those frames in a single box with no bearding, Then you can move on to 2:1 sugar syrup feeding. We'll cover all of that in this series though, don't worry, plenty of episodes left in 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.