#TH HIVE DRAWIT FULL#

I’ve never fed any of them beyond a little dish of honey water with lemon balm, just to encourage them to stick around. I have four hives that were stocked with wild-caught swarms. The sorts of things you do when you don’t know better, I guess. Most often, a new package of bees will not produce enough honey to harvest the first year-so you can feed them as much as you like in year one. The bees will store the syrup right in with the nectar and you will not get pure honey. The other advice is this: Never, never feed syrup with a honey super in place. If you stay in beekeeping you will never run out of a need for sugar. Most stores have sales from time to time. Some places sell it in 50-pound bags which are often cheaper but harder to handle. The best advice I can give is this: buy sugar wherever and whenever it is on sale. Of course, you can also feed your bees with honey if you have a supply from a known healthy source. If a colony is well-fed coming out of winter, they can do fine without the stimulant feeding. Overwintered colonies do not need a lot of spring syrup, although many beekeepers feed 1:1 syrup in the spring as a “stimulant” to get the brood-rearing process started.

Feeding a pollen substitute as well as sugar syrup is a good idea for new colonies. Still, unless those frames have stored honey and pollen, the bees will need help in the beginning. Packages started on pre-drawn comb have it a lot easier and can be weaned much sooner. I suspect that most stop feeding too soon-new colonies need all the help they can get. When to stop feeding is really a judgment call and, unfortunately, those starting a new package on new equipment are often new beekeepers who have little experience on which to base their decision. This is variable because some bees will continue taking the syrup right through a nectar flow and some will not.

Some feed syrup until the bees lose interest in it.

Some feed each new colony one 50-pound bag of sugar.

Some feed until they bees have used five gallons of syrup per package.

#TH HIVE DRAWIT FULL#

Some keep feeding until they have two brood boxes full of drawn comb.Some feed syrup until there are five or six fully-drawn frames and then let the bees take over.So when is that? Unfortunately, every beekeeper will give you a different answer. A steady supply of sugar syrup makes the whole process quicker and easier.īut due to financial and time constraints, most beekeepers draw the line at some point and stop feeding syrup. Without comb the colony cannot survive, and without enough food energy to build comb, colony build-up will be slow. Comb provides a place to live, a place for food storage, a place for egg laying, and a place for brood rearing. The first thing the bees have to do is build comb. If you are starting a package on bare equipment with no comb, almost no amount of sugar syrup is too much the first year. Some beekeepers wean their new colonies as fast as possible, others feed much longer. In truth, how long you feed a new package will vary with your climate, your bees, and your management style. What does the queen sit on? How about a thrown of honey and she might have a staff topped with a honey pot.The answer to this question depends on whether you are starting the package on new equipment or on previously drawn comb. But bees can get up to all kinds of other ACTIVITIES for example … how about having a nursary, or a school, that means you might need a teacher bee or a doctor bee. You may start by thinking about obvious a queen, larva, worker bees, maybe guards or some royal jelly. You can imagine just about any activity happening in hive. Let’s focus on one creative thought – ACTIVITY…Ī beehive is a perfect topic. They form their own little community and they can have so much going on. But what I think is the most attractive quality about bees is that they work together. They are great to cartoon because they are easy enough to draw and yet interesting enough to alter into other characters. There’s something which most people really like about bees. I’ve told this workshop before and it’s always been quite popular. Our topic this time was The Happenin’ Hive.

This past week I had the pleasure giving a workshop to some children through a department of the Government of Ontario. Why is cartooning bees be so creatively inspiring?

Th hive drawit