As you examine your bees’ winter stores and consider some fall syrup feeding, be aware that this is not needed for every hive. It's important to know if bees need feed and how to feed them, but planning for your feeding needs should begin months ahead by monitoring nectar flows and making good honey harvest choices. Try to record your area’s nectar flows. You might observe that if you harvest in July, another flow will usually happen in late summer. You can discuss flow patterns with local beekeepers in your club, or keep track of your own observations each year. A nectar flow may be strong or weak in an area because of land use, soil type, and rainfall. Temperature and wind play their parts too. One area just a few miles away may have a dearth, while a second region has plentiful nectar. The weather from the year before even affects nectar flows, because groundwater levels, frost depths, and plant stress will carry over from year to year. We can’t do much to control nectar flows, but we can (and should) keep track of them.
What is a nectar flow? A nectar flow, sometimes called a honey flow, is a time when bees are bringing more nectar into the hive than they are consuming each day. Signs that a nectar flow is “on” might be cells full of sparkly wet nectar, new whitish wax being added along the top bars, and/or bees festooning to fill the space left behind when a frame is removed. Festooning is when workers cling to each other and form chains or drapes of bees. It’s something they do when their wax glands are making new beeswax for comb building, and that happens during a nectar flow. If you have a scale under your hive, you’ll notice the hive weight rising each day during a nectar flow.
Be smart about harvesting, and don’t be greedy
Aside from tracking nectar flow trends, a smart hive management strategy is to avoid annually over-harvesting honey and then buying lots of feed for your bees. Some beekeepers deliberately harvest all of their bees’ honey and then plan to feed them nothing but sugar syrup for the winter, but most beekeepers prefer to leave their bees with the honey they need and only harvest the excess. Either method can work, but if you take all of the honey and then the weather doesn’t allow for efficient feeding, you could doom your bees, which is why we usually recommend against a complete honey harvest except for experienced beekeepers. Be sure to check the honey stores in the brood chambers before taking the honey supers off, so you know how much honey you’re really leaving behind during harvest.
What’s the right amount of winter honey?
How much honey will your bees need during the winter? This is wildly different for hives in different locations.
In southern regions where winter is less severe, (resembling what we New Yorkers would call “warm fall weather”) bees can forage regularly, and may even find a few flowers blooming during the winter. In these places, sugar syrup may need to be fed during any lean months, as long as daytime temperatures are warm enough for the bees to fly.
You can safely feed syrup at daytime temperatures of 55°F or above. That temperature is important because at or above 55°F the bees can fly out and go to the bathroom - which we call “cleansing flights.” This is why it’s important to be aware of hive weight well before cold days approach. Bees will sometimes drink syrup in the warmth of their hives even when they can’t have cleansing flights, but having so much liquid in their gut without a chance to “go” can cause dysentery and the spread of intestinal diseases between bees.
One of our beekeepers hefting a hive
In northern states, we aim for a double deep wooden hive to weigh 130 lbs going into winter. There are some nice modern hive scales available, and other beekeepers opt for an old farm platform scale. If you don't have a scale, keep this in mind: In a typical winter-weight hive, nearly every frame in the top deep box is full of capped honey. In the bottom deep box, half or more of the frames are full of capped honey, and the rest of the space is taken up by the cluster and the season’s last small patch of brood. This equates to approximately 80 to 90 lbs of honey. Another way to get a sense of a hive’s weight is to heft the hive, which means lifting up one side of it to get a feel for how heavy it is. One beekeeper we know sets up a mock hive weighing 130 lbs., and hefts it every once in a while in the bee yard, to calibrate his hefting of the real hives. Underweight hives are fed or combined with other lightweights, and heavy hives are congratulated and wished luck for the coming winter.
If a hive is too light in early fall, you can feed them 2:1 sugar syrup. That’s “thick syrup”, which is made by heating a quantity of water to nearly boiling, removing it from the heat, and then adding twice as much white sugar as you added water. You could also buy thick syrup from your favorite beekeeping supplier, which is ready to pour right into a hive feeder. If you need to feed syrup in the fall, do it while the bees still have good temperatures (above 55°F) for flying every few days, so they can take cleansing flights. They also need some time to take the syrup from the feeder and deposit it in cells, and then fan it to evaporate moisture and thicken it up for winter food. The latest we can usually get away with feeding our bees is late October, and some years it’s too cold even by then.
Insulation
Another factor to consider when you’re judging winter stores is insulation. Hives with and without insulation can survive the winter, but added insulation helps the bees reduce their need for heating fuel (that is, honey) because they will be losing less heat to the environment. We recommend insulation in the hive’s roofing set up for winter, and many beekeepers are happier if they install added insulation around their entire hive, in the form of a Bee Cozy or insulating wrap. Of course, an easier solution is to use highly insulating polystyrene hives. We carry both the Lyson and Beemax brands of poly hives, and both keep colonies snug during winter and can reduce the need for quite as much stored food.
Fall eating may require fall feeding
Finally, when calculating how much honey your bees will need in the winter, you can’t forget about how much they will need in the fall. Warm fall weather means that bees will be active and searching for remaining flowers, instead of being clustered up and conserving energy. A long warm fall can cause an active colony to burn through sugar stores that they can’t really spare. Especially as we all see increased warm weather in what are supposed to be our “colder” months, it’s important to factor fall activity into your feeding plans. Luckily, a warm fall also allows for longer sugar syrup feeding, so analyze what your colonies need, and then feed them if they need it!
