ksjs
House Bee
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2011
- Messages
- 195
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- North Wales
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 3
My 2nd year (first full year) of keeping bees and I made a potentially bad mistake: I had it in my mind that I fed in October last year when in fact I didn't, I had started in September. Anyway, this year I started feeding in Oct and decided to try a thicker syrup (2:1) to make life easier in terms of evaporating water.
Trouble is this mix kept crystallising and blocking feed holes so even though feed was on there were some days when it wasn't accessible for the bees.
They stopped taking feed about 2 weeks ago and I now have 3 hives as follows:
1 with about 8 frames of stores
1 with about 6 frames of stores
1 with about 3 frames of stores
Each are national hives and the number of frames of stores corresponds pretty much to the size of the colony. The hive with 3 frames was a nuc (following a swarm) that never really got going. It will now be wintering as a nuc again.
Apart from keeping my fingers crossed, vowing to try and never make assumptions based on what I think I did the previous year again and ensuring there is fondant permanently available to all colonies throughout winter is there anything else I can be doing?
By the way, I didn't want to unite the nuc as I was keen to see if a smaller colony could get through the winter and how they might perform next year.
Any suggestions much appreciated.
Trouble is this mix kept crystallising and blocking feed holes so even though feed was on there were some days when it wasn't accessible for the bees.
They stopped taking feed about 2 weeks ago and I now have 3 hives as follows:
1 with about 8 frames of stores
1 with about 6 frames of stores
1 with about 3 frames of stores
Each are national hives and the number of frames of stores corresponds pretty much to the size of the colony. The hive with 3 frames was a nuc (following a swarm) that never really got going. It will now be wintering as a nuc again.
Apart from keeping my fingers crossed, vowing to try and never make assumptions based on what I think I did the previous year again and ensuring there is fondant permanently available to all colonies throughout winter is there anything else I can be doing?
By the way, I didn't want to unite the nuc as I was keen to see if a smaller colony could get through the winter and how they might perform next year.
Any suggestions much appreciated.