Category Archives: FEEDING

Anything to do with feeding the bees.

Stealing From The Rich to Give To The Poor

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It could be interesting to come back to the video in this post in about two weeks, or more precisely to come back after checking on the hives in this video to see if they’ve more or less doubled in size, which is what I want to see.

Specifically, the weak colony in the video was given two frames of capped brood from the strong colony. Most of that brood will have emerged by the time I check on them again in two weeks. Two frames of brood should at least double the number of bees in the weak colony. Supposedly, one frame of brood equals three frames of bees, but the two frames weren’t jammed packed with capped brood, so I’m thinking five or six frames of new bees in total, maybe. Add it all up and what it means is that I want the weak colony that looks this…

A weak colony of maybe three frames of bees and hardly any brood (May 10th, 2020.)

…to have as many bees on the frames as the strong colony that looks like this:

As a strong colony with ten frames of bees (May 10th, 2020.)


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Converting To All-Medium Hives (Sort of)

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Someday I’ll start posting instructional beekeeping videos again, but these days I enjoy down and dirty beekeeping work more, just hanging out with the bees and talking out loud, saying whatever comes to mind. I did this a couple days ago while inspecting all seven hives in my little shaded beeyard. Most of it was junk, what I said and what I got on video, but I still think there’s something to be had from watching these kinds of videos where not much happens, because real life, real beekeeping, is exactly that 95% of the time. It’s grimy tedious work. Let’s see what happens…


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A Beautifully Over-Wintered Colony

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I’ve probably never been more pleased with an over-wintered colony than I am with the one in this video. I’m not entirely sure what I did, but these bees have been clustering way down in the bottom of their hive under an insulating and tasty block of honey all winter long and are only now beginning to show up above the top bars. And they’re not even close to starving. I love it. I’ll drop my theory on how that happened after the video.


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Winter Beekeeping with a Vengeance

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Subtitled: Checking on Bees That Were Buried in Snow For More Than a Month

I still haven’t posted a video of the big storm from January 17th, 2020, that buried most of my hives, but it’s coming. It’s a spectacle, not really a beekeeping video.

This is what my “beeyard” looked like on January 18th, 2020.

In the meantime, I’ve put together two videos of the same thing — a 7-minute video for people who just want to see the bees and not hear me babble on about stuff, and the 25-minute unabridged version of the first inspections I did with these hives since they got snowed in over a month ago. It’s longer than the typical killing-time-at-work video, but it may be worth a look for new beekeepers who want to get into the nitty-gritty of winter beekeeping. I cover a lot on ground in this one. (Watching it in segments and coming back to it throughout the day might be the best bet.) It’s interesting how snowshoes have become standard beekeeping gear for me since the storm. And by interesting I mean annoying.

Here’s the highlights reel:


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The Jigs and Reels of Installing a Nuc in Newfoundland

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Here’s a 20-minute video that documents what it’s like to get a nucleus colony (or a starter hive) on the island of Newfoundland. It’s not always easy. (I’ve also posted a 6-minute version for those who want to cut to the chase.)


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February 2018 Beekeeping Archive

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Here’s an 8-minute behind the scenes video from February 2018 of me messing around with my bees.

Here’s the breakdown:

00:00 — Giving the bees a patty of crystallised honey.

02:15 — Stethoscope vs thermal imaging camera — determining the location of the cluster with each and explaining how that works.

04:25 — Giving the bees a pollen patty buttered with honey. I discuss the pros and cons of feeding pollen in the early winter.

07:50 — Running away from some defensive bees.

Check out my Month of February category for a sense of things that might happen for backyard beekeepers on the east coast of the island of Newfoundland in the month of February.

January 2018 Archives: Hard Honey & Hard Sugar

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I’ve got another shot of archived cell phone footage, this time from January 2018, most of it showing how I feed sugar bricks and crystallised honey to my bees in the winter. It’s only 3 minutes long.

What else can I say about this video? It was recorded at a time when I only had one hive because I was still recovering from a concussion injury and one hive was better than ten. The hive isn’t wrapped. The bottom entrance has 6mm / quarter-inch mesh on the bottom to keep shrews out. There’s a 2 or 3 inch rim on top to make room for sugar bricks, and on top of that is a moisture quilt, which is basically a ventilation rim with screen stapled to the bottom and half filled with wood chips.

Related posts: Feeding Honey Bees In The Winter With No-Cook Sugar Bricks and Recycled Honey: Feeding Bees Crystallised Honey (in Jars).

Check out my Month of January category for a sense of things that might happen for backyard beekeepers on the east coast of the island of Newfoundland in the month of January.

Making Sugar Cakes with a Dash of Honey

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I’ve written about making and feeding my bees sugar cakes before. I think I stole this idea from Honey Bee Suite, like I do many things, though I don’t do anything exactly the way anyone else does it. The basic recipe is 12 parts sugar mixed with 1 part water.

There’s a formula for mixing it more precisely depending on sea level and atmospheric pressure, but I don’t worry about any of that. If it’s too wet, I add more sugar or just give the cakes (or bricks) more time to dry. The only thing I do that might be considered innovative is add honey to the water to make the sugar more attractive to the bees, the logic being that if the sugar smells like food (honey), the bees will be less likely to toss it out the front door like they often do with dirt and debris. That’s my big secret to making sugar cakes: make it smell like honey. Or drop in a bit of anise or lemon grass oil, something to attract to the bees to the sugar. Mind. Blown. I know.

Feeding Honey Bees In The Winter With No-Cook Sugar Bricks

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These days I use sugar bricks to feed my bees in the winter and here’s a quick 2-minute video that demonstrates how I do it.

This is a condensed version of a 4-part video series (not unlike the original Star Wars trilogy) that I posted last winter.
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