An email popped into my inbox yesterday from the government's National Bee Unit, warning that reports were coming in from the seasonal bee inspectors of colonies starving to death, often without the beekeeper being aware that they were short of food. Hives where the honey crop had been taken off but the bees had not yet been fed, and colonies produced through splitting and artificial swarming were most at risk.
I hadn't thought when I last inspected the bees that any of them were that low on stores, but I had made a mental note that some didn't have much in the way of reserves. The chestnut trees bloomed weeks ago, and now the brambles have finished. There are some flowers out in the garden, but I've seen more wild bees on them than honeybees, and it's been so dry there may not be much of a nectar flow anyway. The official reminder acted as a prompt that maybe I should start feeding my bees.
Accordingly while I was at the supermarket I bought six two kilogramme bags of granulated sugar, to get the ball rolling. The man on the checkout remarked cheerfully that somebody had a sweet tooth, and seemed quite interested when I told him about the bees, though perhaps he was just being polite. Back home I dug out my copy of Ted Hooper's book to remind myself what strength syrup to make (two pounds of sugar per pint of water), fetched some feeder buckets from the garage, sterilised the one covered in sooty mould with a hefty squirt of Milton, and mixed up a couple of jam saucepan's worth of syrup.
I left feeding until evening, as advised by Hooper. The theory is that the bees can get excited at the smell of sugar syrup, and you are less likely to end up with a riot of of bees flying everywhere looking for the source of the smell and starting to rob each other's hives if you put the syrup on the hives after their bedtime, when they are minded to settle down for the night. That was about as far as I could go following Hooper, since he also advises feeding every colony at once, the theory being that if they all have their own bucket of sugar syrup they won't bother about what other hives have got or are doing.
I don't have enough equipment to feed all of my colonies at once. It isn't just a question of having enough feeding buckets, you need to add a temporary extra layer to your beehive around the bucket to support the roof. Otherwise you would have to leave the roof perched perilously on top of the bucket, or leave the roof off entirely, either of which would be a very bad idea as soon as the wind blew or it rained. If you had a spare brood box you could use that, but most people don't have that many spare brood boxes, and if you did have spare brood boxes but they had frames in you would have to find somewhere secure and hygienic to store the brood comb while you used the box by itself. I have one very old and battered brood box that I keep purely for feeding, or as a last ditch emergency brood box, and the Systems Administrator kindly made me three ekes out of planks, but as I currently have more than four hives that still wouldn't be enough to feed all the hives simultaneously.
(Nobody I know except beekeepers uses eke as a noun. I presume it is from the same root as eke in the phrase 'to eke out'. A beekeeper's eke is just a four sided, topless and bottomless box the same breadth and width as their beehive, which is inserted into the stack when space is needed to put something else inside the beehive. If that something is a bucket feeder you need an eke that's taller than the bucket, while if it's just a tray of anti-varroa treatment a narrow eke an inch or two high will do. I have some of both. You don't leave an eke on the hive longer than you have to, as the bees will tend to fill any large spaces up with comb, which is a waste of their efforts when all you are going to do is remove it, and a waste of your time when you have to clear up the mess).
I trundled up to the bees with some buckets of syrup, plus an experimental wasp trap made from a large water bottle and some squashed grapes, and discovered that I was still using one of my ekes as a hive stand. Also that I'd forgotten quite how many of the hives had at least one super on, which I added to make sure the bees had enough space. You do not want to feed sugar to bees when there are honey supers on the hive. Firstly, you want them to store the syrup down below in the brood chamber so that they can eat it through the winter, and secondly you do not want them to put it in the super, because when you come to harvest whatever honey is in the super, you would like it to actually be honey, and not dissolved granulated sugar.
I lifted the roof off the first of the hives with no super on, and was slightly taken aback to see bees all over the crown board, the wooden lid with two strategic holes in it that sits on top of the boxes that make up a beehive. Cautiously, since I didn't have my smoker with me and it was very hot and humid and not at all the weather for messing about with bees, I prised up the crown board and peered inside the hive. Bees were spread across the whole width of the box. Now I am sure that when I inspected the bees only last week they were not that crowded, and even allowing for some brood having hatched out in the past few days, I don't believe they are that crowded. I think what must have been going on is that it was so hot that they were spreading themselves out as much as they could, to cool down. I gave them a bucket of syrup, trying to put it and the eke down as slowly as I could so that the bees could get out of the way.
The second hive without a super was exactly the same. I gave them some syrup as well, and then retreated. The other colonies all had at least some honey in their supers the last time I looked, so the bees shouldn't be starving yet. Until the weather cools down I think I'm a bit stuck, though. The bees seem to need the space, so I don't want to leave them with no supers, but while they've got supers on I can't feed them sugar. If I thought they were absolutely and literally starving it would be different, since then they would eat the syrup at once and I wouldn't have to worry about where they stored it, but otherwise I can't really proceed. I think I may have jumped the gun with the NBU email.
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