Sugar baby...

We are in the feeding mode - during the fall weather, it's my job to get the bees stockpiled in food to survive the winter. You do that by feeding 2:1 sugar syrup.

I got some new quart jars, and I put three jars of sugar on the bees at a time. I've already fed them the medicated syrup, so now it's just straight sugar.

Someone asked the details of how I have my feeder, so I took some pictures.

I put the top cover on the hive, and put a couple of sticks (cut from some scrap wood) on top:


Then I upend three jars of sugar syrup. I had already drilled about 10 holes in the lids in basically a line, and I line up the holes in parallel with the sticks (you can see the dark marks I made with a marker on the side of the jar lids to help me orient the lids). I didn't want holes touching the wood rails, because that might cause syrup to leak.


I did a quick inspection this last weekend, since the weather was nice. I noticed that the bees hadn't taken much of the pollen patty I put on a few weeks ago, so I just took it off (it was very moist and mushy, and I noticed a lot of moisture on the top cover of the hive). Obviously they weren't eating much of it.

I didn't look for the queen, since as I mentioned before, there is a lot of propolis holding things together, and I didn't want to break that up and disrupt the hive. I did look and didn't see any brood on the frames I took out, so I have no proof there is a queen. I am going on faith that she is there - there were lots of bees around.