Feeding Bees In A Top-Bar Hive

We have had bad luck keeping bees these last two seasons. Out of the four colonies we have bought and installed in our hives, we have one colony left. And that colony is not very robust. I believe part of the reason is the bees we buy come from Georgia. Our local bee supplier drives down to Georgia every spring and brings back hundreds of colonies. These bees are acclimated to a southern climate with mild winters. I have yet to get one of these colonies through our more aggressive mid-west winters.

I am planning on trying to capture locally adapted colonies this spring. I have done a lot of research and I feel confident that I can build swarm traps this winter and catch some swarms this spring. I will do a more detailed post on swarm traps and the process of catching swarms after I build the traps.

I have reservations about feeding bees sugar syrup as a general practice. My feeling is if your colony grows accustom to getting some of their food inside the hive they will be less robust foragers and you will breed this trait into them over time. That said, the hive I have left this year has completely eaten through its honey reserves for the winter and if I do not feed them I might as well just empty the hive. I will not buy another colony again. I will try to get this one through the winter, but if they do not make it, they will be the last hive I pay money for.

If you need to feed your hive you can do it very easily. The only equipment you need is a couple mason jars with lids and something to hold them upside down. I bought a couple holders made for this purpose from my local bee supplier, they were cheap and very good at what they do. I took the plastic holders and screwed them to a piece of wood. The mason jar lids need tiny holes in them to let the sugar syrup slowly drip out.

The sugar syrup is pretty simple to make. It is a 2 : 1 ratio of white table sugar to water. This will be thick and will slowly drip out of the holes in the lid when turned upside down. Once the bees find it they will constantly harvest it until it is gone.

The reason I screwed the jar holders to the board is so I could use them in my top-bar hives. The plastic holders are specifically made for Langstroth hives, but with a little modification and they will work in top-bar hives. The bees will find the sugar syrup pretty quickly and start to bring it over to the comb in the hive. I have drilled holes in my follower boards to let the bees come and go through them. However, there is a gap below the follower boards that the bees use instead. That is a design flaw in the way I constructed the follower boards. No big deal in the long run though.

I put one pint of sugar syrup on each side of the main hive. You can't see it in these pictures, but the top-bar next to each of these feeders has a board hanging down similar to the ends of the hive, the follower board. This keeps the center of the hive small making it is easier for the bees to keep themselves warm through the winter. I will have to replace the sugar syrup a couple times throughout the winter if I want the colony to make it. I will only open the hive on the warmest day in the forecast so I do not freeze the bees out. Here is hoping they make it through this winter.

We Lost One Of Our Hives.

Homesteading is not easy, nor is it always sunshine and roses like some blogs would have you believe. I feel it is important to share our mistakes and set backs so others can learn from our experiences and realize it is okay to mess up and not get it right the first time or in this case the second. That said I love what we are doing, and can't wait to add more plants and animals to the property.

I realized the traffic in one of our two hives had changed in the amount and nature. I noticed the hive entrance was not being guarded and the amount of bees coming and going had diminished. None of the bees going in the hive had collected pollen and when I looked under the hive I did not see any bees bearding the comb. 

When I opened the hive my suspicions were confirmed. The hive had swarmed. I am not sure if the queen died and they had to raise a new one or they did a split. Whatever happened they had to raise a new queen. Here is what a queen cell looks like. Instead of the uniform hexagons bees normally make, queen cells look more like a mud wasp made them. I found other smaller queen cells around the comb, but I am pretty sure this is the one the new queen emerged from. All the other cells were much smaller than this one, leading me to believe the queen that came out of this cell went around and made sure there were no usurpers in the wings.

This is all that was left in the hive, a handful of dead bees. I have no idea what happened, maybe the hive was stressed and they left after the split. Whatever it was it happened fast. In a normal hive dead bees are cleaned out regularly, so to see so many dead bees left behind makes me scratch my head. All the honey and pollen was completely clean out. I am sure the swarm took most of it and the bees I saw coming and going were robbing what was left. If any bee keepers out there have a theory on what happened please comment down below.

On a happier note, the new comb guides are working much better than the original design I went with. The comb is nice and straight for the most part and no significant cross-combing happened. You can see the comb on the right of this picture was starting to curve a bit into the next bars but that small amount of movement is easy to fix.





 

You can see the new comb design here. I used cove molding with a 90 degree angle to give the bees a more defined guide. I am not as discouraged as I was last year when this happened. Maybe because I lost both my hives last year. But mainly because of a podcast I heard about capturing local swarms and how easy it is. I plan on making a couple swarm traps to use in the spring. In the meantime I am going to focus my energy on keeping our other hive healthy through the winter. I am going to feed them this year, hoping they will make it through. If not, I will try my best to catch a couple locally adapted swarms in the spring.