I prefer to allow the bees to eat their own honey – and I never take too much honey so that they don’t have enough to support themselves during the winter. But sometimes a hive doesn’t or can’t get in enough honey to get them through the winter. When this happens, I feed.
Normally I do the Mountain Camp Method of feeding bees in the winter time. This method is named after a guy with the username MountainCamp on Beesource.com and his idea was to just take some newspaper and lay it over the top bars near the cluster, spritz the newspaper with sugar water, then spread out a bag of dry sugar over the newspaper and then spritz the sugar. This method helps absorb moisture in the hive and yet gives the bees some needed carbohydrates. I like this method because it’s fast – I’m in and out of the hive quite quickly while adding a good month’s worth of feed with very little work. I’m also really keen on the absorbing moisture idea. Here in the PNW, moisture is always a problem.
This time though, I decided to try something different. At our last Beekeeper’s association meeting, Brad Raspet talked about feeding the bees a “bee candy”. You take some sugar with water, heat it up to a soft candy state (about 240 degrees F), cool it back down again and add some acid, and then pour it out thinly to harden. Adding the acid and the heat converts the sugar’s sucrose into something more akin to what the bees prefer: fructose and glucose – smaller chain sugars. “The surcose molecule is a disaccharide composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose”. A mixture of fuctose and glucose is commonly called “invert sugar”.
To feed the bees, you just take a piece of the candy and slide it close to where the bees are clustering.
It is a lot more work than the Mountain Camp Method but I can see where it would be useful, especially on those days you really need to add some sugar for your bees but it is REALLY cold – just lift one side of a box – just enough to slide a bit of bee candy in there and done. The bees will never know you were there.
Here’s an adaptation of Brad Raspet’s (Bingaling Bees) Bee Candy Recipe, feel free to halve the ingredients for a smaller batch.
Bee Candy / Fondant Recipe
Emergency Feeding (late winter or early spring)
Caution: Hot Syrup, HANDLE WITH CARE!
10 lb sugar
5 cups water
1 teaspoon ProHealth or HBH (optional)
1 teaspoon Vinegar
Bring water to a boil on medium high heat. Add some sugar and stir it in til the sugar dissolves, then add more sugar and keep repeating the process until all the sugar is in the pot.
Continue stirring until the sugar is at a soft ball stage (just bring it to 242 degrees), being VERY careful not to splash any on you – nice and slow!
Remove from heat and cool to about 190 degrees, then add vinegar and HBH (if desired)
Stir well and then pour onto paper plates or some other mold (I like to use an inner cover that is covered with freezer paper) – you want it thin enough to place on the top bars.
Should be fudge hard when cooled, simply place on top bars to feed.