Treatment-Free Beekeeping Podcast - Episode 15 - David in Tennessee

This episode, I talk to David LaFerney, a sort of avid hobbyist like myself who engages in the excellent practice of making and selling nucleus hives.

http://www.parkerfarms.biz/Podcast/TFBP-Ep15-David%20in%20Tennessee.mp3

Feeding Granulated Sugar

While I generally try to feed as little as possible.  When I do need to feed, I am lately trying to avoid syrup because of all the problems it causes.  So I feed granulated sugar.

This hive above as you can see never really made it up into the second box.  Being that this hive uses medium frames, a single box is not much.  Normally I wouldn't be so concerned about a small hive like this, but I want to raise medium nucs this year.  And while I don't need a medium hive to make queens for medium nucs, I do need brood on medium frames which means I need some medium hives to survive.  So I took out half a dozen frames or so and laid a paper towel across the space and put a couple pounds of sugar in there.  So you can see the result.


The time to feed is naturally when all other options are off the table.  It's early or mid winter and you can't feed syrup. Feeding is a last ditch effort to save a hive, not to prop it up, but to maintain its utility.  These hives that I fed will not be used for honey production or breeding.  For the most part, they will be split up to donate their brood to new hives which will be headed by queens bred from the best.  If they are lucky, the queen and some brood will be placed in a nuc to draw comb for the spring and then probably killed either by summer or by being combined with some stronger hive.  Much depends on each hive's spring performance.  A solid spring can make up a little ground from a weak fall and winter, especially for a yearling hive.

Feeding Sugar

Here is the latest picture of the home yard.

 Not the clearest, but you can see that many of the trees have lost their leaves, but the cherry in front of the yard has just started.  Got the hole filled where I dug out the rock in the back as well.

As I've mentioned a few times, we had a really wet spring, and a really dry hot summer leading to there being very little stored honey in the hives and necessitating taking action and feeding them.  I fed through the fall with 3:2 sugar syrup and now that they're not longer taking syrup, I'm feeding with granulated sugar.  Granulated sugar has some goods and some bads.  The goods are that the bees can take it even when it's cold, it doesn't cause robbing, and it helps absorb moisture in the hive.  The bads are that the bees don't always take it and they might just clean it out like any other refuse.

The shims that I use (which I lovingly refer to as 'Parker Shims') make a good space to pile sugar on top of a paper towel.  To the left in the picture below, there is a frame feeder and it is full up with sugar as well. We'll see how this turns out.