🐝 When And How To Feed Fondant - Four Proven Winter Methods That Prevent Starvation

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to be reviewing and showing you how to put onto your hives Honeybee Pro fondant. So you might have seen I've done previous videos discussing kind of the benefits between using a proprietary branded fondant like this versus a Baco fondant, so like a real generic baker's fondant that you can get through Baco. I haven't done one yet versus a homemade fondant, but I really would kind of recommend steering away from any homemade fondant or candy. I don't think it's worth the risk. Quite a lot can go wrong. I would stick to either a branded product like this or go for a generic baker's fondant that's really cheap and does the job really well. So in this video, I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about the Honey Bee Pro fondant, why I'm using this fondant this year versus the Baco fondant that I normally use. I'll show you how to apply it to a couple of hives couple of different methods of application. You can see which one fits best with your method of working, and I'll give you my reviews and recommendations for the product. So it comes in boxes about this size, really heavy. It's about 14 kilos, comes in 7 2-kilogram blocks, and this is what the 2-kilogram blocks look like. They also do 14 1-kilogram block versions as well, so it's entirely up to you which kind of way you want to do it. For me, I find I'm never feeding my bees anything less than 2 kilos at a time. Even the nucs, I'll just double this up and give them 2 kilos. Saves me going back for numerous visits. So personally, I prefer the 7 by 2 kilogram variant versus the 14 by 1 kilogram variant. Now, I bought this Honeybee Pro from a company called Bee Equipment. I paid for it myself, I paid the full price, and I'm going to give you my honest feedback and my honest review. I'm always a little skeptical when it comes to proprietary bee fondants and candies like this that are marketed as having additional benefits in terms of growth or better for you than using a standard baker's fondant. I think a lot of it's just marketing blurb, and I generally think that all of them are pretty much the same. This is a standard baker's fondant, so a standard beekeeping fondant. Doesn't have any added pollen added to it, so it's not a protein patty. It's not designed to accelerate growth of the brood, which is definitely what you don't want at this time of the year. We're kind of in November, December now. They do other versions of this, so they do a version with added vitamins, and I don't know, what does added vitamins mean? I don't think that bees need added vitamins throughout the season. They've got their honey as well, they've got sugar syrup, they've got invert syrup in there, I just think a standard carbohydrate-based fondant is what they need. And now that depends on what you're looking for from your fondant. For me, all I'm looking for is to get the bees through the winter if they don't have enough stores. It's as simple as that. Pure, simple carbohydrate feed to give them energy in order to keep the hive at the correct temperature. So for me, you're not going to see me saying I recommend Honeybee Pro fondant over Ambrosia fondant over any of the other fondants on the market. Personally, I think they're all much of a muchness and they all do the job really well. What I will say though is that whether there is anything better over a fondant like this versus a standard baker's fondant from Bakewell, I personally don't think there is either. And normally I would have gone down the route of buying it directly from Bakewell because it's considerably cheaper. This year, however, I got a great deal on this, as you probably see on their Black Friday sales. It was really cheap, so once I'd taken the VAT off, it actually worked out cheaper than buying the Baco fondant. The Baco fondant comes in a big 12 kilogram block that I have to chop up and portion up. This comes in 7 2 kilogram blocks, which means I don't have to chop it up, I don't have to portion it up, which makes it really, really user-friendly, nice and clean, and saves me time, which is what we're all about here at No Nonsense beekeeping. So if you want a direct recommendation to say, should you get baker's fondant, should you make your own fondant, or should you go with a Honeybee Pro or, um, or an Ambrosia fondant, or any of the branded fondants like the Apipasta— personally, I don't think there's a huge difference between the two latter ones there. I definitely wouldn't advise you to make your own fondant, only because I'm not comfortable doing that, and I'm not comfortable with the temperatures that you reach and the potential damage that you could do to your bees by feeding them something that's not safe and tested. I know from my personal experience that standard baker's fondant is fine for bees. It doesn't cause them any issues. I know loads of bee farmers that use it. There is no issue with that. If you're buying it in smaller amounts and you want it pre-packaged and you want it nice and easy, Honeybee Pro or any of the branded fondants work really, really well. The choice is entirely yours. So some of the sales pitch on this Honeybee Pro: it's GMO-free, which I think most fondants will be. It's 100% natural origin. I'd be really worried if it wasn't 100% natural origin. It's enzyme-based, which is the same as the baker's fondant. It's got very low HMF. Now that is one positive that these branded fondants do have over baker's fondant, is that the HMF is measured Now it's not to say that the HMF of this is going to be any less than the baker's fondant. All it's to say is it's been measured and it's been proven to be low, which is a good thing. And the final one is that it's 100% EU origin, so everything within this fondant is kind of made or manufactured within the EU. I like to think that they've got greater quality control processes, but the baker's fondant may well be manufactured within the EU as well, but it just doesn't promote that. Right, so enough about the packaging. Let's get some of these open and get them onto some beehives and show you how to use them. Now, the first thing to say is you don't need to use this fondant if you don't need it. You should only really be emergency feeding fondant if the colony is light. Otherwise, you're going to end up with excess stores in your frames because they've got the additional fondant that they need to take down. So the easy way of working that out is you just give the colony a lift. Now you can get on there and you can use the hive scales as we've done on a previous video, but I can tell from this colony here they're probably a little bit light. I shouldn't be able to kind of come in and lift that up like that so easily. Some of the other ones are considerably heavier than that, so there's no real harm to adding the fondant to this colony on the basis that it's probably a little bit light. So I'm not going to bother with the bee suit today. I might get one or two flying up, but you'll see this colony here is pretty cold today after we've had a very mild November. So I'll crack the lid open, you'll see probably the bees starting to cluster, and I'm going to show you the first method for adding this Honeybee Pro fondant to your beehive. Right, so the first thing you want to do before you start opening the lids is you want to kind of make sure that the bees can access the fondant. We're going to do that in a couple of ways on this video, if I can find the multi-purpose crown board that I need to do it. The first one though is going to be the easiest method that you can use. And all we do on that one is we just start scoring the base like that, go all the way across. I'm going to apply a full 2 kg block to this one, and all you're doing is you're giving it some access so the bees can make their way in there. So once you've scored that over like that, I like to take away about a 10 cm by 10 cm square, so you're direct to fondant. You don't want to do that across the whole thing because then it can drip down. You just want to give the bees access to a small amount. They'll work their way in there and spread throughout the fondant. But then you get a few cracks over here as well, and that just means that the bees can start to work it at various points, but the plastic protects it dripping down from them. So the benefit of poly Ashforth feeders is that you can do all of this without adding any additional combination of material to the hive. So you can do it with an eke, you can do it with a super, or if you've got your polyashforth feeders already sitting on the hive, all you have to do is pick them up, invert them, put the fondant on, and you're good to go. So there we go, that's the base of the polyashforth feeder there. We've got our rim on, so you can see you got plenty of bees up there. Got a nice cluster of bees there over 8 frames, really nice big cluster of bees, really healthy, obviously very gentle this time of year, although if you do get a mild day, they will come up at you. And then all I do is I take that fondant where you've cut out the access hole underneath and very gently just place that directly on the bees. Have a look, make sure the queen's not there. You don't want the queen to get stuck in the fondant, but you just want to really gently place that onto the bees. And they'll start to access it to feed it. Now, if you do it nice and gently like that, what will happen is the bees will just move out of the way of it. You're not putting that much force on them. You can see it already, they're starting to move down away from it. So it's really gentle on the bees, but it's good because you're putting that fondant in direct contact with the bees. Which means they know where it is when the cold snap comes. So then what I like to do is I take a piece of old Celotex, as thick as you can get it. I mean, you go skip diving, you'll get this for free. Don't need to go out and buy it new. And then what I do is I take my poly Ashforth feeder and I make sure that this piece of Celotex will fit nicely inside it like that. What you need to do there is make sure you've got sufficient depth there to take the additional fondant that you placed onto the hive. So then you've got a few bees underneath here and you just, you need to get them off. So the easiest way of doing that, and I might get a few of them flying up at me, is just to give it a tap and dislodge them. You can see the bees, they're pretty chilled out this time of year. You've got a few flying up, that's only because I gave them a bit of a whack to get them off. You could use a brush as well, but I find that sometimes you can annoy them a little bit more by using a brush. So I find that that's a really good method just to get them off. I mean, put your bee suit on if you need to, but at this time of the year, all they want to do is just get back into cluster because it's pretty cold. And then what we're doing with this polyash forth feeder that you put your Celatex in on the inside is you're just going to turn that upside down and you're going to place that directly on the colony like that. And then just place the roof back on. And it's as simple as that. That's why I love these polyash forth feeders. I use them as a crown board, I use them to feed syrup, and then I can also use them to feed fondant when I need it for the colony. I don't need to go and find any ekes, I don't need to go and find any supers and take the frames out and store the frames. Everything is self-contained within the hive for all kind of opportunities throughout the season. So I really do like my poly Ashworth feeders. Even if you're on a wooden hive, I think they're a really good investment. Cost about £25, but it's Great, and it saves loads of time throughout the season. So don't forget to strap your hive back up. Do a check all the way round. You want to make sure that you've got mating face contact between the upside of the poly feeder and your brood box. Don't want any drafts getting in at the top there. You want to keep it nice and sealed. And that's it. It's a really easy, quick way to apply Honeybee Pro or any other fondant to your colonies to get them through the lean winter months. If they need the additional stores. So I'm just going to show you a couple of other variants of how you can apply that fondant. Quickly going to do the Abello 6-frame nuc and show you how easy it is to apply fondant to this nuc. So first things first, take the roof off, and then again, before you take anything off there, you want to prepare your fondant. And this one, you're going to prepare it slightly differently to the other one. What I'm going to do on this one is I'm going to cut a slot. And then I'm just going to take off the mini Ashforth feeder. I'm just going to replace it with the, with the fondant, matching up the slots, the slot that's in the crown board to the slot that's in the fondant. And it's as simple as that. All I've done, I've removed the mini Ashforth feeder, And I've replaced it with the fondant and the slots lined up. So now the bees, instead of going up and accessing the slot for the mini Ashworth feeder, they just come up and they access the slot for the fondant. And then all that's left to do is just to put the roof back on. It's such a slim roof anyway, this one. You don't need to pack it out with any additional Celotex or anything like that. You've got a poly insulated crown board in there as well, and they're only accessing it up through a slot. So there's no need to do any additional insulation. Right, the next way I'm going to show you how to do it is to use a super and Celotex in terms of insulation. Now this is probably one of the most popular ways of doing it. Does mean that you need to take out all of the frames from the super, which can be a real pain. That's why I prefer the poly Ashforth method. But if you don't have those feeders in place and you want to do it with the super, this is how I recommend doing it. So you can see the colony there again is quite active. It's really strange, these should be heavily clustered this time of year, but it's about 12 degrees here today, so they're pretty active and they're checking me out, but they're not stinging me. Take an empty super and you just want to place that super on top. And then what I've done is I've cut out some polystyrene Correx and I've just cut out a slot in the middle That's going to allow the fondant to be placed directly on top of the bees. This really helps keep them warm though, so I definitely recommend kind of cutting this out, or at least very minimum using a full block of Correx. So then same thing again, you want to just score it all over like that. Get out those first few middle ones. Or if the cluster is off-center, you can kind of move that square off to the center where the bees will be, and you just want to take that down and put it onto— directly onto the bees in the hole where the Coryx is. Now I think I've got loads of bees all over my face. It's great, they're not stinging me, but yeah, they're really not that happy. So I'm going to close these guys back up. But that's how you add any sort of fondant if you want to do it inside a super or an eke. And then the final method, and this is the method that I would use if I didn't have polyash forth feeders, although you can use it in conjunction with a polyash forth feeder, is crown boards. Now I would have done this with my multi-purpose crown board because it's perfect for it, but it's at the back of my storage container and I just can't get to it. So I'm using this kind of insulated crown board, or you can use a wooden crown board with porter escapes. Basically any crown board would do, but if you're using the multi-purpose one, you've obviously got the sides to go around the side as well, so you don't need to use it in conjunction with a super or a polyash forth feeder or an eke. So I'd recommend if you're using this method, just follow the same steps but use the multi-purpose crown board if you've got one. Right, so really similar steps to all of the other ones, but on this one obviously you're just adding that crown board in, which helps the bees kind of keep all of that temperature in within the hive, and then they just access up above the crown board when they want to access the fondant. So I think we'll do this one with the insulated one with the small access holes, because I do like the poly. I made a few of these a few years ago and they've held up really well, but I don't use them anymore now that I've got my poly Ashford feeders to work as crown boards. These have come pretty much redundant. So what you want to do is make sure that you've got the Bee space on the correct side, so you've got access for the bees on a bottom bee space hive to access the space underneath the crown board. And it's really interesting to see the difference because this hive here is nowhere near as big. They cluster down considerably smaller than some of the other hives. Now, it doesn't mean that when you get to March and April that this one's going to be any smaller. They've just chosen to cluster down considerably smaller over winter. So there's plenty of bees in here, there's plenty of weight, it's just a considerably smaller cluster. So all you need to do here, work out roughly where the cluster is. If you've got a multi-purpose crown board, your hole's going to be in the center. If you can cut them just off-center, it does actually help with this. So I'm going to do a revision to that next year, but just try and get the holes roughly over where the bees are. So then the next thing you want to place on, again, get your fondant, do the scoring, leave a nice hole, put that directly over the hole like that. And then you want to take your insulation box like that, that we've done before, the big square, and you just want to place that over the top. Now you've got 2 options here. You can either upturn the polyash forth feeder, which is probably what I'm going to do here, but if you've got a super or an eke, you can do this method as well. So this one, you don't necessarily need that additional piece there. So if you want to do away with that, that's absolutely fine because you've got so much insulation here. What you want to make sure though is that you've got enough space in your eke or your super just to take that fondant. It doesn't hurt to put more insulation in, just helps the bees keep the insulation where they need it, keep that warmth within the hive. And that's it, you can place the roof back on. So there you go, I've showed you 4 different methods there for applying Honeybee Pro fondant to your beehives. I've showed you one where we go directly onto the frames with an upturned poly Ashworth feeder. I've showed you one where we're applying it directly to a nuc, and that will work on pretty much any nuc that's got an access slot for feeding. I've showed you one where we're going to apply it directly onto the frames with an eke or a super. And then I've showed you one where we're going to apply above a crown board with an eke, with a super, or an upturned polyash forth feeder as well. Now there's a final one that I haven't showed you there, and that is where you chop the fondant into smaller pieces, and then all you're going to do is you're just going to place them on top of the crown board hole in maybe like a plastic takeaway container. You don't get as much in that way, but it's a good way of kind of monitoring how the bees are taking down that fondant because you can see through. So that's it for the video. To summarize, I don't think it makes a massive difference whether you're using Api-Pasta, Honeybee Pro, or any of the other branded fondant products versus, say, a Baco standard fondant. I would recommend not making your own fondant or candy though, only because I don't have the experience in doing that to make sure that it's safe for the bees. And it's so cheap to buy the fondant in anyway, I really wouldn't bother with making your own. So I hope you found this video useful. 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.