Absolutely right DanI, I‘m in the same position. If by plonking fondant on that they turn out not to need, makes me a “bee haver” then so be it.
Many folk haven’t “had” bees long enough to make the judgements some on here are professing should be made. So cut us some slack and if we have to remove the odd frame of uneaten food in the Spring - well we can use it to maintain nucs.
That was a tip the same folk were putting out in other threads.
I have no issue with feeding fondant ... and this is the general forum so hopefully the people playing in here will have the sense to undestand that the consequences of overfeeding are that there may be a need to remove frames of stores from hives in the Spring. These frames of stores can be very useful for feeding swarms or starting off Nucs.
The cautions I put forward are the results of seeing some beekeepers (and not always new beekeepers) who take the supers off mid August (working to what the book says) when there may still be another month or two of good forage left (certainly in my area) and the prospect of a good flow from the Ivy. In these cirumstances the bees will often fill the brood box with honey from their own foraging but ...
They immediately slap on a feeder with syrup and keep feeding for weeks ... until the bees stop taking the syrup down and then they slap a whopping slab of fondant on top of the frames as they have been told to 'just in case' .... Just in case of what ? If the box is full then there should be sufficient stores to see the colony through until early spring ... in some colonies - well beyond.
The reality is that doing things by rote, on the day the beekeeping calendar says it should be done - without any thought about either what they are doing, whether it is necessary and what the possible consequences are, is not good practice. The people who have not kept bees for long are often advised badly by people who have been advised badly by those before and whilst they may have kept up with more up to date ideas - they overlay them on top of, rather than instead of, previous practices.
Feeding bees, if you take the majority of the honey they produce, is a necessity - it has always been thus ... the problem is, as I said earlier, that overfeeding has consequences that - if not corrected in spring - will hinder spring build up and can lead to early swarming.
Feeding bees fondant is not bad ... doing it when it is not needed or 'just in case' ... can have consequences.
