I've started feeding the bees. To compensate for the fact that I've taken most of the surplus honey they made earlier in the year, they get a solution of granulated sugar, two pounds of sugar dissolved per pint of water. As I bought the sugar I did notice that Tesco's stocks of granulated sugar were lower than normal. Can it be that with the increased number of beekeepers we are now starting to buy sugar in quantities sufficient to denude supermarket shelves? It was probably just coincidence. Tesco are not always very good at that sort of thing, so they devote about 10cm shelf space to preserving sugar, enough to hold one row of bags and one row only, and every year are taken by surprise that marmalade making is a seasonal activity that happens in the first half of February, and fail to restock the shelf several times daily, as they need to for that brief period. Nowadays I try to remember to stock up on preserving sugar any time I see it from about Christmas onwards, rather than wait until after I've bought the Seville oranges to try and track some down. My purchase of ten large bags of sugar reduced the height of the pallet by one layer, so it's not impossible that several other Colchester beekeepers have done the same and made a visible dent in stock levels. But probably it's just normal consumption, and Tesco have been a bit slow restocking. Looking on the bright side, granulated sugar was on special offer.
I heat the sugar solution in a large stock pot until it is well and truly dissolved, but don't boil it. I give it to the bees using a contact bucket feeder, which is (beekeepers will know this bit and might as well skip it) a plastic bucket with a close fitting lid, and a hole in the lid filled with very fine mesh metal gauze that the solution can leak through. The bucket goes upside down on top of the board over the brood box (the crown board) which has a couple of strategic holes in it for this reason (among others). I've already taken the supers off, so there is no risk of them being filled with 'honey' that is actually Tate and Lyle's finest, and to make space under the roof for the bucket I put an extra super with no frames in it. The roof of the little nucleus hive has extra vertical space built in, to leave room for a feeder, and I have a miniature bucket that fits in there. (Anything that is inserted into a beehive to give some extra headroom is called an eke, and I am hoping that the Systems Administrator will make me some ekes out of offcuts of decking, as it can be a nuisance having to empty the frames out of a super).
The bees are supposed to take the sugar solution down into the brood box, and store it as they would honey, to use through the winter. The total amount they need to take is more than the contents of one bucket, so I was back today doing refills. They took the first lot very quickly and before it could crystalize in the bucket, and I'll keep going with second helpings until they lose interest.
Listening to the bees foraging on the ivy flowers, I thought I'd better get on and remove the super that was still on the late-running colony, before they could put any ivy honey in there. The last time I checked the bees the honey in the super still wasn't capped, and the bees were so busy I left them to work on it for a few more days. Ivy is one of the last things to flower in quantity, and the bees love it, but I got a super of ivy honey at the end of one season, and it tasted completely disgusting. There was nothing to be done with it but feed it back to the bees. As the super today was full of bees I couldn't remove it at once, but put a clearer board under it (another crown board but this time with one way bee escapes fitted in the holes). I took a view that as I didn't want to go through the frames in the hive, I could lift the super off, remove the queen excluder, whip the clearer board on and replace the super without smoking the bees. I could, but they began to emerge from the hive very quickly without smoke. It was a humid day, not at all the right weather to disturb bees more than you had to. The colonies being fed were far quieter, but of course I wasn't taking their crown boards off.
I'm not at all convinced that the swarm is going to be large enough to make it through the winter, but I don't want to mess with the other bees, so I won't try and combine them, but will feed the swarm and leave them to take their chance. It will be interesting to see how they do. I saw a varroa mite on one of them during my previous inspection, so coated the tops of the frames liberally with icing sugar, the idea being that the bees get sugar on themselves and have to groom it off, in the process grooming off the mites. I have some chemical treatment that I'll use on the others in due course, but reading the instructions the dose would be too high for such a small colony. I noticed wasps around the colony entrance, so set up a wasp trap nearby while I was at it.
Being a small-scale hobby beekeeper, I make up my sugar solution as I go along. People with more colonies make it in bulk. My beekeeping tutor once managed to upset a container holding several gallons of solution, in his kitchen. Not advisable. Very sticky.
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