Laurence Edwards compares honeybee feeding methods and finds that colonies fed fondant show poor queen laying and weak spring populations, while syrup-fed colonies thrive. Use 1:1 syrup year-round, switch to 2:1 or invert before winter, and save baker's fondant only for January-March emergencies when bees can't process syrup.
In this video, I'm going to tell you why I never ever feed fondant unless it's in an emergency. Now, when you're getting your bees ready for winter or you're feeding your bees in the spring, there's a wide range of options for you to feed your bees to make sure they're doing what you want them to do. There's 1:1 sugar syrup, there's 2:1 sugar syrup, there's invert sugar syrup, there's plain fondant or candy, and then there's a wide range of fondant and candy with different things in. You can have vitamins, you can have pollen sub, you can have real pollen. But in this video, I'm going to tell you why there is no reason that I ever feed fondant unless it's in an emergency. Now, if you're wondering what's going on with these bees here, I had a drone-laying queen, I shook them out, and now they're all just kind of going into their new home there. And it's like really nice just to stand next to some super, super friendly colonies that are flying up like this and to do some videos for YouTube. You're wondering where you get nice calm colonies like this from? blackmansinhoney.co.uk. Very, very nice calm Buckfast queens and nucs. But I've had lots and lots of experience using fondant, using pollen substitute, using candy with pollen in it, and 1:1 syrup and 2:1 syrup. I've tried feeding it in the spring, I've tried feeding it in the summer when they need it, I've tried feeding it in winter, going into winter, and I've just found that the bees don't do anywhere near as well on fondant unless it's an emergency. So I did a series a couple of years back which was getting the bees ready for winter exclusively feeding them fondant. And it worked. The bees got through the winter. But what I did notice with the colony that I'd exclusively fed fondant is they came through the spring nowhere near as big as the colonies next door that I'd trickle-fed with 1:1 sugar syrup and then backfilled with 2:1 at the end of the year. Feeding fondant doesn't stimulate the queen in the same way that feeding 1:1 sugar syrup does. So in my view, you only really ever need to feed your bees fondant when there is an emergency and the bees require access to Food, because without it they are going to die. And you could say, well, in that instance you can, you could feed syrup, you could feed 1:1, or you could feed 2:1. But if you're coming across a colony of bees in, say, January or February in the UK or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, and the box is feeling like super, super light, the bees aren't going to go in at low temperatures and, and use that syrup that you're going to give them. So the only option at that point of the year is to feed them fondant. Now, if you're wondering what kind of fondant that I use, I use the cheapest possible basic baker's fondant that you can get from Baco. Comes in big 12.5 kilogram slabs, and I keep a big supply of it in the house for use in an emergency. Now you might see like some of the videos that I've done this year saying, well, I'm getting the nucs ready and I'm feeding them up with fondant. And again, I did that in an emergency. I didn't have enough feeders. I've subsequently ordered some additional feeders now. I put the fondant on, and if you watch those videos, I did a few exclusive channel member videos. And if you're interested in becoming a channel member, Just head over to the homepage, hit the join button next to the subscribe button. We've got a good range of channel membership options. But if you compare the 2 colonies, the one that got fed fondant versus the one that got fed 1:1, it's chalk and cheese. It really is very, very different. The one that was fed 1:1 syrup stimulated the queen, stimulated a flow, grew the colony, expanded them going into winter, gave them a better chance of going through winter. Whereas the one that got fed fondant, the bees acted like they were starving. They used the fondant the same way that they would use stores within the colony. So they went for weeks and weeks without there really being any natural flow or simulated flow, which meant that the queen said, no, no, no, I'm not laying any eggs. This isn't what I do. I need to wait for incoming nectar before I lay eggs. And the result was the colony drastically reduced in size compared to ones where I'd fed them 1:1 syrup. Now I've just done a video talking about the differences between 1:1 and 2:1 and, and kind of commenting on David Burns' video of when you can use 1:1 and using it all the way throughout the year, and I'll just recap on that. For me, use 1:1 all times throughout the year. The only 2 times that you shouldn't use 1:1 is when it's too cold to use any sort of syrup, and then for the very last feed of the year where I would use invert, but you could use 2:1 syrup as well because it gives the bees the best chance of processing that ready to get into winter. Only feed fondant in an emergency from January through to say March. As you move out of March into April, you can start feeding 1:1 sugar syrup again. The bees will go up into their feeders, access it, and you'll start to get really nice rapid spring growth. Hope you enjoyed that video. Hope you enjoyed watching the bees cluster up. I'm really enjoying watching them having good fun here. If you did enjoy it, please hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and see you next time.
