New Hobby: Bee Keeping

[massphatness]

We pulled the honey supers off a couple weeks ago. I think I got over-excited about our honey haul from earlier in the year, and I put three supers on after we had extracted instead of just going with one and adding as needed. The bees ended up working a little bit in one box, a little bit in another and a little bit in the third. As a result, we only ended up with about 12 lbs of honey. Most of the frames were only partially built out. No biggie. I don't know what I would have done if had gotten a lot more honey anyway.

The previous couple years I haven't done a fall feeding and thought I'd give it a try. I know the bees haven't starved out the past two years because there's been a good amount of honey in the frames when I've popped them open in the spring. Had the colony died of starvation, there wouldn't be anything in the frames. Still, better safe than sorry. The feed is a sugar syrup in the ratio of 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. (Interesting tidbit: a container of water weighs about the same when it's filled with sugar; not exact but close enough to make the syrup.)

At a 2:1 ratio, the syrup promotes honey production which will give the ladies extra food stores for the winter. In the spring, the ratio is 1:1, and that promotes brood rearing. No idea why.

I'm using an entrance feeder. The feed drips into it & the bees crawl in to slurp up the sugary goodness. Will be interesting to see how quickly they go through it.