July 2011 - Amazing Bees - Beekeepers from Melbourne Australia

Feature of the month

Sharing some of our joys, highlights and worries of beekeeping ...

July 2011 - Emergency Feed for struggling colony.

9-Jul-2011 - Wintertime is not the time to open your hives. The bees now give you the time for building boxes, frames and other equipment and the time to expand your knowledge by reading.

Nevertheless, a visual inspection of your hives from outside can settle your mind, by ensuring that everything looks and feels alright.

Check that the hives are tilted forward so moisture can drain out of the entrance.
Check that no grass or weeds are blocking the entrance.
Perform a weight check by lifting the back end of the hive, assessing whether or not the bees have sufficient food stores.
Resist opening the lid to have a look at your bees.

It is in the middle of winter and we were not having many pleasant days lately. A weight check of our hives revealed that our worry-hive has run out of honey stores, they were carrying in plenty of pollen over the last weeks but are sure out of honey.

The worry-hive
Early in May 2011 I removed two feral bee colonies out of the wall of a bungalow to be demolished; the alternative was to have them exterminated. Both colonies were infected with nosema and had weakened to a condition that did warrant their extinction over the next few weeks or months by starvation. Although the combs filled a compartment between the studs in the wall, more than 95% of the combs were just empty cells, brittle like thin glass, covered with grey, white and green mould. The bees had retracted to a comb area of half the size of an A4 sheet of paper with probably 100 grams of honey stores, a dozen cells filled with pollen and 20-30 cells with brood - and this on the verge of winter!
I have merged these two weak colonies, transferred them on two sheets of the original comb, added two sheets of clean & dry comb into a 4-frame nucleus and have fed them in our backyard - two times 2.5 litres of sugar syrup - they stored it all away and have been very busy collecting pollen during all this time...


The Challenge
It is too cold for feeding them more sugar syrup, so I decided to bake some sugar candy (for the first time) and feed them with candy. When I poured the cooling solution into the moulds I was expecting to get a soft and formable sugar mass, like marshmallows or the icing on a cake. Instead I got two hard, but sticky, transparent blocks, looking like amber glass.
That will give our bees something to chew on for a while, but I'm sure they will be able to convert these blocks to the energy they need to keep warm. After all, they are amazing little creatures.

23-Jul-2011 - Half the block of amber candy has already been taken up by the bees. The block resting on the hive mat, once hard like glass, has meanwhile softened on the surface, due to the moisture building up under the hive lid - this allows the bees to lick up the thick syrup rather than dissolving the crystal block.

3-Aug-2011 - The block of candy gone and little food stored in comb I decided to swap two almost empty frames for two frames full with honey and some pollen, that should give this struggling colony of determined battlers a boost.

25-Aug-2011 - Checking the condition of our worry-hive - the tiny colony is slowly increasing in numbers with a fresh brood area on newly occupied comb - a sign of hope that this colony will make it. It seems to be possible to rescue bee colonies in the middle of winter!