Was This Good Advice?

I saw a video the other day saying that you can feed 1:1 sugar syrup to your bees all the way throughout the year and that you never ever need to feed 2:1. In this video, I'm going to tell you why that is really bad advice to do that in the UK. Now, the person who produced that video is David Burns, who is incredibly knowledgeable and an excellent beekeeper, and I think he's giving you that advice with the best intentions for what works for him. I've had a number of people message me saying, well, you're saying to feed 2:1, David's saying to feed 1:1, What should I do? And like I said, I've got massive, massive amounts of respect for David. Excellent beekeeper, phenomenal YouTuber. I've got nothing but love for David. But in the UK, feeding 1:1 late on in the year really is not a good idea. Now, I'm not that far away from David's approach. In fact, I'm very, very close to what David does, and I've said it in loads of videos previously. The technique that I use is I take my honey off middle of August, I put my Apivar strips in, I put my feeders on, and I start to feed my bees very, very early on using 1:1 sugar syrup. All the way throughout August and all the way throughout September, if the bees need a feed, I'm feeding them 1:1, because all they're doing, and this is what David alluded to in his video, is they are taking that light syrup thinking that it's nectar, continuing to expand the brood nest where appropriate, and they're using it to create the winter bees. Now, if you feed them 2:1 at that point, they'll do a similar-ish thing, but you don't really get that turbocharged nature of 1:1, which simulates a flow and stimulates the queen. So I'm kind of like 100% with David all the way up until that point. But at that point in the UK, and like the weather at the moment is very, very nice, but we're on like the 3rd or 4th of October today. But over the next few weeks, If your colonies are not up to weight yet, feeding them 1:1 can potentially lead to quite devastating consequences in the UK. Feeding 1:1 up to this point, they're going to convert it into brood, they're going to convert it into bees. They've got decent weather enough to fan that 1:1 down to store it as heavy feed over winter. But as we move into kind of early October, middle of October, back end of October, there's a couple of risks of feeding 1:1. The first one is the bees take it down and then you get a real cold snap and they move into cluster and they can't get that moisture content down to the correct level for storage, and thus you increase the moisture available within the beehive that can give you issues with condensation. So that's a risk that we don't want, and that's a risk that's mitigated by using either 2:1 or invert syrup. And then the second risk is that you put it in the feeder, the same thing happens, the bees cluster up because it gets cold, the syrup goes mouldy up in the feeder, and then you get a warm day and the bees go up and try and eat this mouldy syrup, and you can potentially have further issues with dysentery. Again, completely mitigated by giving them either 2:1 syrup or invert at this point in the year. So I'm not going to go on for hours about that. I just wanted to give you a very localized approach for the United Kingdom as to why that advice is 99% very, very good advice and very efficient and cost-effective advice for you. But just for that final feed of the year, I do recommend in the UK, go with 2:1 anytime after the beginning of October and the bees will thank you for it in the spring. Now, if you're watching this video and thinking, well, that would've been a really useful thing to say like a month ago, it's way too late for that now. I run a channel membership page on my YouTube channel. If you sign up to channel membership, you get access to these videos literally within days of me producing them. They're fully advert-free, so you don't have to watch any adverts on YouTube as well. Just go to my homepage, next to where the subscribe button is, there's a join button. Hit that and we've got a wide range of channel membership options just for you.