When you think about it, feeding honey bees sugar syrup is a pretty weird idea. After all, aren’t they supposed to be honey makers? However, for a variety of reasons, by the end of the season they may not have enough honey stored in the hive to ensure winter survival.
Perhaps it’s a new colony that used up most of the spring and summer nectar resources just expanding and drawing combs. Perhaps the weather didn’t cooperate and summer nectar was scarce. Or perhaps the beekeeper harvested too optimistically, expecting a later flow that didn’t pan out. No matter the reason, don’t let a shortage of honey in your hive endanger your bees’ chance of surviving winter. Don’t just hope for the best - top up the combs with sugar syrup so you know that they have enough to not only survive, but to do so in an environment of plenty.
Beyond simple survival, there is a big difference between a hive that never wanted for food during the winter and one that barely made ends meet. It's the difference between a booming colony that hits the first honey flow in top shape and one that’s still struggling to rebound from a winter famine.
The goal of feeding syrup in the fall is different from spring feeding. In the spring, syrup is fed to encourage population increase and comb drawing. In the fall, the purpose is to create a stored surplus in the already-drawn combs.
Of course, honey is the best bee food, but sugar syrup will provide a backstop of needed calories. In fact, some kinds of late nectar can be harder for the bees to digest than sugar syrup. So, if they need feeding, don’t hesitate to give them syrup.
Why are honey stores so important to colony winter survival?
Bees don’t hibernate during the winter. They gather into a cluster in the center of the hive and keep themselves warm and alive by contracting their muscles and sharing body heat. The minimum core temperature of a winter bee cluster is above 70 degrees F. In winter, the difference between the outside air temperature and the temperature in the center of the cluster can be an astounding 40 to 100 degrees F. Fueling that enormous demand for energy is a diet of extremely concentrated carbohydrates: honey.
By the end of January, long before the end of winter, the energy demands ramp up even further. By this time, the colony has likely already started to raise brood. And unlike adults that can tolerate short periods of cooler temperatures, brood can’t. Brood requires almost constant 91-95 degrees F in order to survive and develop properly.
Since the new brood is often started long before there is any chance of foraging outside, the strength of the first rounds of brood depends on what was stored in the hive the previous fall. Even a moderate shortfall will reduce the size of the early brood cohorts because fewer will survive to emerge as adults. That, in turn, plays out in successive rounds of new bees throughout the spring. The first bees that emerge are replacements for the soon-to-die, over-wintered bees. If there are fewer early brood survivors, there will be fewer nurse bees to support the main build-up later on.
If your goal is to have booming hives ready for the first honey flow, or ready to be split to make more colonies, make sure your hives are very well supplied the previous fall.
