Archive Special: Fall Feeding with Kim Flottum (298)

WEBVTT

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Hey listeners.

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Here's a segment we enjoyed doing.

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It's an archive segment that we thought you would like to hear again.

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Jim, have you ever had to feed your bees?

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Oh yeah

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I have, Kim.

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In the past.

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I've d had to feed quite a bit.

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Well, you know, there's there's a lot of questions about feeding.

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And I'm people who haven't been doing this very long all kind of basically have the same sorts of questions.

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Hi, I'm Kim Flottum, and I'm here today with Jim Tew, and today we're going to be talking about fall.

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Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast.

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Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty,

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The fun and the challenges of managing honey bees.

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Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees.

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Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started,

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Get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

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The first one that I get often is why are you feeding?

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Can't the bees take care of themselves?

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I

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I'm going to have to struggle here too some.

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I feed to subsidize the food they've got because I think it helps.

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Kim, sometimes I wonder if it just keeps me busy while my colony either dies or while it corrects its own problem.

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Because what feeder?

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Right off the bat, if feeding was the right thing to do every time, we would have a feeder or two.

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That fits the bill.

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But there's all kinds of feeders.

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Use a top feeder, use an entrance feeder, use a division-board feeder.

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If you're feeding liquid syrup, there's all of these different feeder models that you could use.

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So I never really know which one's the best, which one the bees learn to take it from, and by the time you get that figured out

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probably whatever the issue was that required feeding is pretty much passed.

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Yeah, well, you know the

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There's kind of another side argument here is if your bees are unable to support themselves in the environment that you've put them.

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is it because the bees have a problem?

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Are they not healthy enough?

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do they have issues that they can't forage enough to gather food, or is there not enough food out there?

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for them and in either case you're not taking care of them or you've put them in the wrong place.

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So why are you feeding is those I think that

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that kinda goes to answer why are you feeding them?

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They're in the wrong place or they've they've you've not taken care of them so that they're healthy enough to produce enough.

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Kim, can I call this a management band aid?

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If you have a defeat, something else went wrong.

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Now maybe, maybe it was your shortage as a beekeeper.

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Or maybe it was a shortage you expected, like you made a divide.

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And you knew that colony was going to be light in stores, and you didn't have honey to feed it, and you wanted to feed that small colony.

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While they got a jump start, and maybe you knew that you made that split at a time when there was no incoming nectar

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But maybe you knew that the season would be starting in just a week or two and that there would be incoming nectar.

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So you applied a management band-aid to get the bee colony through these difficult times

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That's a good way of looking at it.

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In the wild, if a colony swarmed in the spring, it would the swarm would be probably fairly small, and if it was

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healthy enough and there were enough bees in it, it would probably make it through the summer, but if it didn't, it wouldn't survive.

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So what you're doing is you're

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You are art you are, I'm not gonna say artificially swarming, but you have produced another colony from the original and you are supplementing its food resources

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So that it does survive.

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Beekeeping and bees in the wild, in my opinion, are not bees in my hive at all.

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Bees in the wild will never have somebody come along and give them a piddling amount of sugar or some kind of other kind of carbohydrate or in some cases protein source.

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They're going to either have to live or die.

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And this expected, apparently, instinctually, that a lot of those colonies in the wild are going to die.

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I don't want that to happen.

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I want my bees and my boxes to stay alive, so

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I'm going to put some feed in there.

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So what do you feed when you feed?

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Let me think.

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Through the years, I've tried everything.

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I generally feed syrup.

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Kim, do you heat the syrup because I generally feed thin syrup just because it's easier to make.

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That's not the right thing to do because someone like you is going to say, well, you're just giving them a lot of water, aren't you?

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Yeah, I am, but at least I gave them a little bit of sugar because

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Because if you've got the heat and add sugar, add sugar, add heat, add heat, add more sugar, stir, stir, stir, they're probably going to starve to death.

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I'm probably never going to do that.

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So what do I feed?

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I generally feed a syrup as thick as I can make it with water as hot as I can get from the tap, and I understand

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that's probably not the best feed that I could have made.

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But no, I don't try to get corn syrup of any kind.

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I d I do feed fondant a lot, but let's talk about that more in a few minutes.

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The syrup I feed is pretty thin right now.

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Yeah, the you know, all the books will tell you know, to stimulate a colony to kind of get it going, up and going, you feed a one to one, a ratio of one part sugar to one part water.

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But if you're trying to feed it so that there's enough sugar there for them to store, then it's a two to one, two parts sugar to one part water.

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and a two-to-one mix is so thick it's almost difficult to stir.

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Jim to make a one-to-one sugar syrup

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You gotta put in seventeen cups of sugar to a gallon of water.

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Seventeen cups.

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Seventeen cups.

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And that's one to one.

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So to make a two to one, you're doubling that.

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Like I said, it's so thick you can almost you almost can't stir it.

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So what you're doing is better than nothing.

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neither of us do what the books say to do.

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That two to one.

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I've never made a sugar syrup two to one.

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because it's so hard to do.

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I'm you mentioned fondant

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I like using fondant.

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You know, in the old days, Kim, everything is in the old days to make things light, but there used to be recipes for making this fondant candy board.

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It with cream of tartar in it and all these kind of things.

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I I never did it.

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I it looked like divinity that my grandmother would have made.

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Yep, yep.

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I've came I came across this fun I can give you the brand name, but I guess I won't.

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commercial fondant.

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It's got it's got

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Corn, not corn, corn, corn flour.

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What is it?

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Corn powder?

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Cornstarch.

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I'm sorry.

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It's got cornstarch in it

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And a lot of beekeepers don't like feeding that because it's indigestible to the bees apparently.

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But is it so easy to put a glob of that stuff on there?

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And Kim, it's just heavenly.

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While you're working with that fondant, if you lick your fingers, it's just the sweetness of heaven to use that stuff.

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So that way there's no mixing.

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It's pure sugar.

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It's just it's already there.

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It's kind of, you know, pricey.

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You gotta go buy the stuff, but it's so easy to feed.

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Yeah, it's and when you put ten pounds of fondant on you can be pretty sure you got almost exactly ten pounds of sugar in there and that makes comes down to about eight pounds, the equivalent of about eight pounds of honey.

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So

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I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna say that yeah, fondant for me is the best way to go.

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Sugar syrup is and you mentioned all those different kinds of feeders and every one of them works, but none of them work perfectly.

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Right.

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So many times in beekeeping, Kim, there's so many options.

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And I would like to suggest, without any proof, that if there's a lot of options surrounding a management procedure,

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That means that the jury is still out on what to do and how to do it.

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Because if we had figured out the right way to control Varroa

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We wouldn't have all these right these other ways to do it.

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If we had figured out the best way to feed, we wouldn't have we wouldn't have ten feeder styles available to us.

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Number of queen cages you've got that you can choose from, something's not right with that.

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So every step of the way, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of creativity that beekeepers

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Can use.

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you know, I asked about f when to feed and you mentioned when you make a divide and y and you want that divide to make sure that it lasts as long enough that it can build itself up to be self-supporting.

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There's also a need for f feeding in the fall, so the bees have enough overwinter to store.

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How much how much honey should be in a colony

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we're in we're in northern Ohio.

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How much honey should be in a colony, say, the first of December when pretty much everything's done?

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You want a number?

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I'll give you a number.

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Yeah.

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Sixty eight sixty eight pounds.

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And then there's okay all kinds of variables.

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Well, how much did the hive body weigh?

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That's 68 pounds of honey, and that's going to be a gracious plenty

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I've read other that could go as low as forty pounds, but it depends on the size of the cluster.

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And you know, where this thing is wintering.

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So, what I've been told through the years and what I have boldly repeated to beekeepers who wanted an answer was in Northeast Ohio 45 to 62 pounds of actual honey.

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Which means that the colony would weigh a double would weigh something like a hundred and forty five to a hundred and sixty pounds if you weighed the entire colony.

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Well, I was just gonna mention that.

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Is a way to tell how much how much food you've got stored in that colony is to weigh that whole colony.

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That's simply use a spring scale on the front

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Record that weight.

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Use the p hook it on the back, record that weight, add the two together, and I've always said 150 pounds.

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Just most exactly what you just said.

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So if you've got a colony with two deeps, ten frames, bottom board, inner cover, and cover, 150 pounds is going to give you about 50 to 60 pounds of honey.

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So if you don't have that.

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Feed but Kim, you know, but this is this is more conversation than instruction

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Feeding's kind of thing that there's something else wrong.

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If you and if you just feed a time or two or three, you probably just prolong that colony's death, unless, just like you said at the first of the start, there was a reason for it.

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So f when you feed, if you're trying to feed for winter supplement, that's a significant undertaking.

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That's going to be gallons and gallons, because we're talking one colony.

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When you said one gallon of syrup

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What if you got 30 colonies and there's 30 gallons of syrup times 17 cups per gallon?

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And all of a sudden, this is a big job.

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So it's a lot of work to feed, and it takes a lot of commitment to keep feeding, enough to get the job done at a meaningful level.

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And then you gotta figure out again, I'll go back to where we started.

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Why you're why are you having to feed?

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Is it because there isn't enough food available or because there's something ailing the bees that they're not able to collect enough?

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And

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That you that brings you back to that problem.

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You gotta solve that problem.

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Why isn't there enough?

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Have you said dry sugar?

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Dry granulated sugar?

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I've done it.

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It's a mess.

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And how did you feed it?

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I just I sprinkled it on the inner cover, around the inner cover hole opening, and I think they carried as much out and dumped it on the ground as they ate.

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Well, I've done that too.

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And I think that they carry it out and dump it on the ground as soon as they can.

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I think they probably eat some of it.

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I think the main thing it does, Kim

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is it makes me feel like that I did something as a beekeeper.

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And I didn't just stand by while that colony idly starved.

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So if I let that colony go into winter really light and I go out and do the tip test on the back

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and that colony is easy to tip.

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It's nowhere close to a hundred and fifty pounds total.

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Then I have these anxiety attacks, can't doze off at night worrying about that colony, and I'll go out there and pour a pound and a half of sugar

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around that inner cover hole and feel like that somehow I've done my part.

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When I've when I was way back when, that was the test.

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If you could lift it

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it needed food.

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If you couldn't lift it from the back, then it had enough food.

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And I always looked at that and said, okay, I'm just

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tall, skinny guy and next to me is this guy who's a professional wrestler when he was in high school.

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Why

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What what how do you compare the two?

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This guy picks the colony up with one hand and puts it under his arm and walks away and I can't budge the thing.

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Hefting was always kind of unknown to me.

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Well, you gotta learn your own heft, Kim.

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That was I was a tall, skinny guy I would never was all that tall.

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I was always skinny and lightweight.

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unlike now where I'm still kind of short and heavyweight, but the hefting thing was a relative thing.

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What's a heft to me would not be a heft.

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to that wrestler.

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Everybody has to learn their own weight thing.

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Yeah.

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That weighing front and back to me is spot on in terms of being able to decide if there's enough food in there.

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And then if you don't know

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You know, then you have to look, but it saves you looking at a it saves you having to look at a lot of colonies.

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Kim, at times you have to f at times you have to feed.

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But probably you're feeding because you want to try to help the colony that's in trouble.

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Why it got in trouble?

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Yeah.

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It's what we've tried to discuss and some of the things you can do to help them get out.

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But feeding is not always the end-all solution.

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But it is something that the beekeeper can do in their arsenal, in their toolbox of

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management suggestions.

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You can feed to help this colony.

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Sometimes it helps.

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Sometimes it just lets the colony linger a while longer before its den still comes around.

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Yep.

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And I guess when that weight gets to where you want it, it's time to quit and or there's enough snow on the ground that you can't get to the colony anymore, so

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and you're just done.

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Yep, just done.

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Yep.

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Alright, so feed if you have to, and then stop feeding when you can.

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There you go.

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I guess.

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Thank you, buddy.

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Take care.

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Let's talk again next Thursday about something just to stimulate.

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Thanks.

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Thanks to all these folks who bought up listened this long.

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We deeply appreciate you doing.

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And if you got questions, don't hesitate to send them in.

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Go to our webpage and there's a spot there that you can ask us a question.

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We're looking for questions.

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Bye.