feed the bees

There was a lull in the weather, allowing me to clean the chickens' roosting board and see to the bees.  Poor chickens, I suppose they will be sheltering in their house now, or under the corner of a lean-to wood store that projects over their run.  It can't be much fun, being a chicken in an endlessly wet winter.

All four hives had compact clusters of bees in them, which started to break up as I disturbed them. Chickens do give the impression that they are capable of enjoying themselves, given something to eat, space to roam, and a sunny day, but bees don't really make it on to the fun scale.  About the best they manage is purposeful content, on a warm, dry day when there's plenty of forage and all's well inside the hive, the queen present and correct and laying, but fun is too frivolous for them. You might as well ask whether an oak tree was having fun, or an earthworm.

I was glad to see the bees still alive, since the last time I saw them I was dosing them with oxalic acid, and they did not like it.  Bees may not do fun, but they do grumpy, not to mention downright aggressive.  In theory I should have lifted the corner of each hive in turn to gauge the weight of it, and so tell whether the bees needed extra feeding at this stage of the year.  If so I was prepared to give any light hives a two and a half kilogramme bag of the splendidly named Ambrosia bienenfutterteig, or feeding paste.  It is a soft sugar paste very similar to bakers' fondant, so much so that some beekeepers simply use the latter.  I buy the animal feeding product, because I don't know any bakers, and would worry in case the human version contained any additives that weren't suitable for bees.

The bienenfutterteig comes as slabs about an inch and a half thick, sealed in plastic packs.  I discovered when the box arrived that it is worth storing them flat side down and not on end, otherwise the fondant distorts inside the plastic, leaving you with an irregular lump that may be too thick in places to fit in the space at the top of the beehive.  Rather than put the feed on top of the crown board that covers the body of the hive, so that the bees have to go up through the holes in the board into the roof space to reach the fondant, it is better to put it directly on top of the frames of bees.  You create a narrow space to put it in by using an eke just under two inches tall which sits on top of the brood box, then the crown board rests on the eke.  You want to keep the extra space to a minimum, as the bees are working to maintain the temperature of their cluster, so you don't want to leave them in the bee equivalent of an impossible-to-heat open plan house.  In cold weather you can even fill the space around the fondant with hessian sacking.

I didn't want to open the packs of fondant until I'd decided whether the bees needed it, since it will keep better sealed up.  However, cutting open the vacuum pack with scissors, in bad light, your vision obscured by the veil of a bee suit, takes a while, and I found that if I'd already messed around hefting the hive, by the time I was ready to rest the fondant on top of the frames, the bees had beaten me to it, the cluster had broken up, and there were bees standing all over the hive just where I wanted to put my two and a half kilo sugary brick.  It was nip and tuck whether the first hive even needed any extra stores.  It was certainly not light, on the other hand the days are lengthening and the weather is mild, so the queens will start laying soon, if they haven't already, and the food requirements of the colonies will go up.  I wanted to feed the bees, not squash them to death, so after the first couple of hives I decided to give every colony a lump of fondant to be on the safe side, and to to take no more than a brief peek beneath each crown board to check they were still alive before I opened the packet.  I managed to get the last pack on the final colony with barely a bee coming up to see what the fuss was about.

After that I did a quick run to the dump, as the bags of weeds had dried off overnight sufficiently for it to be OK to put them in the car.  Then it began to rain again.