Beekeeping

Feeding your Honey Bees in the Winter with a Candy Board

12/4/2012 1:31:34 PM

By Melissa Caughey

Honeybees work.  They work all spring and summer to store up enough pollen and honey for their colony to survive the winter.  However, sometimes, their best efforts are not enough and they can end up starving to death if their supplies run out.  As you have read, in the early spring and late fall when the nectar and pollen supplies are low, we feed our honey bees sugar syrup as a supplement.  They can take this honey syrup or leave it.  The choice is up to them and it provides them with access to extra food if need be.  However, sugar syrup and freezing temperatures do not agree, thus those keeping bees in colder climates must feed their bees another way.
I have researched this very topic quite a bit.  The good news is that there are options.  You can make fondant that sits on top of the frames, that they bees can eat as needed.  You can use the Mountain Camp Method with some sugar poured directly on newspaper, or you can create a candy board.  To me the choice is clear.  The candy board once made requires little maintenance   It is easy to refill.  It can hold up to 15 pounds of sugar.  The sugar itself, helps to absorb moisture and humidity from the hive.  It is accessible to the bees from all the frames in the upper deep.  It does not require the beekeeper to open the hives frequently to check and replenish the food.
I set out on my journey.  I am lucky enough to have wonderful friend whose boyfriend made two frames just for me.  They are the 2" high and the width and length of the hive's body . Think spacer-beekeeping friends. Drill a 5/8" hole into the center of one of the shorter sides.  Then I spray painted them and allowed them to dry overnight.
Next, I added hardware cloth to the bottom.   Wear long sleeves and work gloves.  It can take a real good bite out of you!

  

Place these flat onto a piece of plastic or as in my case the children's art mat.
Line the bottom with one layer of black and white newspaper, or in my case, I used some plain packing paper. (newspaper without any print.)
Next I cut an easy access entry hole in the bottom of the paper lining near the outside access hole.  This would serve as a pathway for the bees to easily gain access instead of having to chew through the paper.

  

I placed a small square plastic container right side up to keep the integrity of this hole.
It was time to mix the sugar and the water together.  In a very large cooking pot, I mixed by hand two cups of water to 10 pounds of sugar.  Once combined, it will appear clumpy.  Dump that into one of your candy boards. You can also add a pollen patty into the bottom of the candy board as well prior to dumping out the sugar.

  

Smooth it out using the spoon and then transitioning to your hands.  The candy board can accommodate 15 pounds of sugar for areas colder than Zone 6.  15 pounds of sugar will combine with 3 cups of water. If using 15 pounds of sugar, to ensure uniform sugar placement flush with the inner cover, try using a small piece of lumber or a ruler to smooth the top flat.

  

I set the candy boards aside to dry.  Inside during winter weather, they should dry within 24 hours to a very hard consistency.  Once dry, remove the plastic container.
Place the finished candy board between the upper most deep and the inner cover.  This emergency food source should last the bees through the entire winter.  I will be placing these on the hives tomorrow and will probably not take a peek at the hives again until February.  My fingers are crossed that the bees survive the winter. It is entirely up to the strength of the colony now.
Some benefits to using a candy board
1. Less frequent entry into the hive by you.
2. Less exposure of the bees to temperatures outside the hive as you open to replenish their stores.
3. The candy board's sugar will help to absorb excess moisture inside the hive, helping to keep humidity low.
4. The entry/exit hole in the side of the candy board will allow excess moisture to escape the hive.
5. Ease of use. Less mess.

Read more: http://www.grit.com/animals/feeding-your-honey-bees-in-the-winter-with-a-candy-board.aspx#ixzz2oyy114Mt

Langstroth, Top-Bar or Warre?: Choose the Right Hive for You and Your Bees

If you’re interested in beekeeping but are debating which type of hive to choose or if you’re already a beekeeper and are wondering about different types of hives then read on.  Here I’ll talk briefly about the three different types of hives I use and discuss some basic pros and cons.  Let’s start with the the best known and most popular.

Pros and Cons of the Langstroth Beehive

So, chances are if you’ve ever driven by a house or piece of land and seen beehives, you were looking at a langstroth hive. These are the standard hives used in the United States and most developed countries.  Imagine a wooden rectangle with wood frames that slide in vertically and rest in place on a top lip like a file folder.  Inside the frame is a thin layer of wax foundation printed with a hexagonal pattern that the bees will use to draw out their comb.  There is a removable top cover, a bottom board upon which the hive rests and a narrow entrance or slit between the bottom board and the hive body from which the bees come and go.  To add room for an expanding colony or for honey stores you add a super (basically another hive body, frames and all but shorter in height) directly on top of the hive body, then replace the cover on top of the super.

Pros

- Langstroth hives are standardized so it’s easier to find solutions for a specific problem.  For example, during my first year of beekeeping, one of my hives had so depleted their honey stores that their population had grown dangerously low. I was able to obtain a frame of brood and two frames of honey from a fellow beekeeper and save my colony. Due to the standard dimensions of langstroth, there are a lot of accessories for pest control, harvest, expansion, etc. that are readily available.
- When you harvest from a Langstroth, you slice off the tops of the honeycomb and spin the honey out of the cells.  You then put the frames back into your hive ready to go. It takes 8 lbs. of honey to make 1 lb. of wax so because the bees aren’t building comb from scratch every year you will be harvesting much more honey from a langstroth.
- Extraction is also much easier because honey extractors are built to work exclusively with langstroth frames.

Cons

-There is no way to know where your wax foundation is coming from or what contaminants it has been exposed to.
- Bees draw wax out from the cell size printed on foundation which is larger than cells in natural comb.  Some beekeepers feel that this contributes to problems like the varroa mite.
- Bees naturally want to move down not up which can prove to be a problem while overwintering.  Sometimes bees will starve to death because they have no honey stores at the bottom of a hive even if they have one or two supers full of honey on the top.

Pros and Cons of Top-Bar Hives

A top bar hive (TBH) is a long manger-like hive that has wood bars covering the top from front to back and some sort of roof over that. The bees will draw a comb from the bottom of each bar (no frames or foundation here). The entrance can be a slit in the front or a few holes in the side.  TBH’s can be an inexpensive DIY option or you can spend a pretty penny on one made of cypress or cedar complete with an observation window.  My point is that it can be as basic or fancy as you want and that in itself should probably count as my first pro.

Pros

- My number one pro here is that in all three of my top bar hives my bees seem to be unusually docile and prosperous.  They just seem to be really happy in this architecture and don’t mind inspections.
- Watching your bees build their own, pure white combs down from a bar of wood is really nothing short of magical.
- There are no supers to deal with during inspections which means little to no heavy lifting.
- As previously stated TBH’s can be a very inexpensive option so if you’re on a budget it’s worth doing some more extensive reading on this subject.
- The honey and wax you harvest will be from your colony only.  This is especially important if you’re planning on using the wax you harvest to make cosmetics.
- Comb honey generally sells for more money.
- You will have much less hardware to store through winter months.

Cons

-They require more frequent (at least twice a week) inspections during honey flow/comb building season in order to intervene if they start to attach their comb onto more than one bar.
-Since there is no standardization, you will have to custom build most equipment (hive beetle traps, entrance reducers, queen excluders, feeders, etc.).
- Your honey harvest will be significantly less than with a langstroth.

Pros and Cons of Warre Beehives

In my mind a warre hive has aspects of both a langstroth and a top bar but the ultimate goal here is minimal intervention.  If your main interest in keeping bees is pollination for your garden then this is an excellent option to look into.  It’s basically a vertical top bar hive that is meant to mimic the hollow of a tree.  It’s smaller than a langstroth and has a box at the top that you fill with wood shavings between two layers of a “quilt” (pieces of cotton fabric) for temperature and moisture control.  The entrance is in the front at the bottom but much more narrow than a langstroth so you won’t need an entrance reducer.  Just like langstroth hives you use supers but you add these to the bottom instead of the top.

Pros

- Super low maintenance for the hands off beekeeper.
- They are more self regulating. My warre bees seem to have less issues with population and temperature control.  I rarely see significant bearding on my warre hives even when my top bar and langstroth hives are bearding like crazy.

Cons

- Warre hives can be ­­expensive if you’re planning on buying one ready made.
- Adding supers to the bottom is difficult if you don’t have an extra pair of hands to help you.
- The entrance (while perfect for the bees) makes it impossible to use an entrance feeder so you have to either make your own top feeder or place a feeder into an empty super on the bottom but this is really inconvenient to refill.
Personally, I don’t feel compelled to have a favorite.  I really enjoy having all of these hives in my home apiary and find that they all add something unique because of their individual strengths and weaknesses.  I feel that by keeping bees in different types of hives I’ve learned more about bees themselves, not just how they behave in a single type of structure and for me, that’s what it’s all about.
Photo of Langstroth by Flickr/2020 Vision
Photos of Top-Bar by Lindsay Williamson (2)
Photo of Warre by hive manufacturer and store, Bee Thinking, www.BeeThinking.com.

Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/langstroth-top-bar-or-warre-zbcz1310.aspx#ixzz2jurE9MSv

Keeping Bees in Towns and Cities (Timber Press, 2012) by Luke Dixon features everything an urbanite needs to know to start keeping bees: How to select the perfect hive, how to buy bees, how to care for a colony, how to harvest honey and what to do in the winter. Urban beekeeping has particular challenges, and this book highlights the difficulties and presents practices that are safe, legal and neighbor-friendly. Learn how to safeguard your hives from common winter beekeeping problems in this excerpt taken from the book. 

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Keeping Bees in Towns and Cities.

“The months will be long and cold, and it may seem that you will never see your bees again.”

As the days begin to draw in and the colony reduces in size, it is time to prepare for winter. Eventually the bees will huddle down in a cluster to keep themselves, and their queen, warm during the winter months. The temperature inside the hive will drop to about 20°C and the cluster will move around the hive to feed on its stores of honey. If you have taken it all from them, then you will have to give them something as a replacement—sugar in the form of fondant, the thick white paste that is spread on cakes and buns. A local baker will often supply it, or you can purchase it from beekeeping suppliers in plastic bags. Just cut a hole in the bag and place it over the hole in the hive’s crown board. The bees can come up and remove fondant from the bag and take it down to the cluster. Not nearly as good as honey, of course, but the bees will need it if there is not enough honey in the brood box to keep them going.

Common Winter Beekeeping Problems: Pests and Diseases

Now is the time to think about disease and pests, though an eye must be kept out for them throughout the year. The varroa mite is a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, that invades a hive, multiplies in the brood, and lives on the thorax of the bee. The Asiatic honey bee evolved with this parasite and so is able to cope with the mite in its hive. But the varroa mite arrived in the homes of the European honey bee with devastating effect. Any beekeeper now has to be alert to keep varroa out of their hives.

Hives have been redesigned to help in this, with mesh floors through which the mite will drop if knocked off the bees. Unable to climb back into the hive, the mites can be collected on a tray under the mesh floor so that you can see how much of a problem you have. The little brown shiny creatures will glisten, like tiny pinhead-sized conkers, amongst all the other debris from the hive that has fallen through. There are various ways to kill them and to help the bees to remove them from the hive. There are chemical treatments, or you can dust the frames of bees with finely ground sugar and that will help dislodge them and make it easier for the bees to knock them off themselves.

There are diseases that the bee is prone to. Nosema is an illness whose dysentery-like symptoms can be seen outside the hives as the bees soil the hive and the landing board. There are horrible diseases of the brood, called European and American ‘foul brood’, though they know no national boundaries. These are so serious that in Britain you are obliged to notify your government bee inspector if you suspect them and, if necessary, they will destroy your colony.

With luck your hives will be healthy. Most are. Just as most beekeepers are. But once the honey harvest is off it is time to treat for any disease (so that no treatments end up in your honey) and ensure that your colonies are as strong as possible before the cold winter months.

Common Winter Beekeeping Problems: Predators

It is also time to protect your hives from bigger predators. There are wasps, woodpeckers, foxes, mice, and badgers—all ready to eat your bees and your honey as highly nutritious sources of winter food.

I can hear a woodpecker at the Natural History Museum and occasionally see him. He does not yet seem to have noticed the hives, and I have got through all my seasons without him picking off my bees as they fly in and out of the hives, or worse, drilling a hole in the hive to get the juicy food out. Woodpeckers are a winter pest. In January and February when the ground is frozen hard, a beehive is an easy source of nutritious insects. Urban foxes can be much more of a problem throughout the year, quite fearlessly nosing into a hive, knocking over unstable ones. I came one morning to find a hive at Coram’s Fields, a children’s playground, with its super and roof pushed aside and the brood box exposed. The cold and wet had killed the colony. It might have been a human who had disturbed the hive (maybe the one who had stolen my scooter helmet a few weeks before while I was working on the hives), but more likely it was the fox that was standing on the wall next to me as I looked at the destroyed hive. I have strapped up all my hives ever since.

Straps will not stop a human of course, and may even tempt a teenager. The hives at the Lillington Estate in Pimlico are protected against this particular pest. There are signs close to the hives warning of the bees and signs on the hives themselves saying DANGER BEWARE OF THE BEES in bold bright type. And the hives are strapped down within an inch of their lives. Despite all these precautions there are the occasional mornings when Jim the gardener arrives to find the straps removed. It is certainly not a fox who has done it. It must be a human, perhaps out of curiosity or maybe as a dare or a bet?

Smaller but no less of an urban pest is the house mouse, looking for a warm place to nest. They are as much a problem in a hive as in a house, and the best way to deal with them is to block up any hole they might get through. In the hive that means the entrance, which should be reduced to as small a space as possible during the winter, making it easier for the bees to defend and more difficult for the mice to squeeze through.

Worst of all are wasps. Like all bees except honey bees, colonies of wasps do not survive the winter. Once the queen has hibernated there is nothing for the rest of the colony to do and they hang around in gangs, scavenging on anything they can find to eat. The sweeter the better. So they will invade your picnics and if they get a scent of honey they will invade your hives. Wasps can destroy a hive in a couple of days. Just as you are relaxing at the end of the season and decide to go away for the weekend, the wasps will arrive and clean out your hive. They will eat anything. Not just the honey but the bees as well. The bees will do their best to defend against the predators. A small hive entrance will help, as will wasp traps easily made out of old fizzy pop bottles. You can watch the bees literally wrestling with wasps around the hive, grappling each other on the ground. Give them whatever help you can.

Common Winter Beekeeping Problems: Losing Your Bees

It is always sad to lose your bees. However careful you are with your husbandry and management, not all your colonies will survive. It has been the collapse of colonies that has led to the growth of interest in bees and beekeeping over recent years and brought many new beekeepers into the hobby. The causes of colony collapse are many and varied, but there are some that can be kept at bay. If you keep your bees fed over the winter, and protect them against disease, the chances are they will survive through to the spring.

After the regular weekly checks on the hives in the spring and summer, as the days get shorter and the temperature drops, reading the hives, strapped up and sealed against predators as they are, becomes much more difficult. But it is still possible to monitor the activity of the bees in the winter cluster. You can listen for them by pressing your ear on the side of the hive, you can feel the heat coming off the hive, and you can see the tiny fragments of wax that drop through the mesh floor of the hive as the colony uncaps stored honey. The pattern of wax pieces on the tray under the floor also gives you a sense of how large the colony is and where in the hive it is clustered. And you can heft for stores, carefully lifting the hive at one side to detect its weight and therefore how much honey the bees still have left to feed on. If you are feeding with fondant, a quick glimpse into the roof of the hive will show you whether the bees have eaten up into the bag of sugar. In the depths of winter it does not do to delve too far into the hive—and there is little to be done for the colony except to fend off woodpeckers and mice, to keep it dry, and to ensure it has adequate stores.

The season has finished. Time to clear up and plan for next year. There is mead to be made from any leftover honey, lotions and potions, soaps and salves, to be concocted from wax. The months will be long and cold, and it may seem that you will never see your bees again. But then one day the pussy willow will be in bloom and a foraging bee will be out bringing in the first pollen of the year. The new season will have begun.