Feeding is a decision, not a date in the calendar

The usual approach to autumn feeding is a weekend in September and the same amount of syrup for every hive. It is simple, it works often enough, and it is wrong in both directions at the same time.

Both errors cost something

A colony that already had enough stores gets fed anyway. The syrup goes into the brood nest, the queen loses laying space at exactly the wrong moment, and you have paid for sugar in order to create a problem: fewer winter bees, raised in a smaller nest, because the cells were full of syrup.

A colony that was light back in August gets the same standard ration and is still light in November. That is the expensive error, because you find out about it in February and by then there is nothing left to do but fondant and hope.

The reading that decides it

Stores are recorded as frames, on the same scale as everything else in an inspection: six frames honey. A hive going into autumn on four frames of sealed stores and one going in on eight are two different situations, and the September decision follows from the August reading rather than from the date.

The arithmetic is short. Decide what the colony needs for your winter, count the capped frames it has, and feed the difference. In a deep Langstroth box a full frame of capped stores is roughly two and a half to three kilos; in a British National about two. A colony that needs twenty kilos and has five full frames needs about seven more kilos of stores, which is roughly nine kilos of sugar as thick syrup, since the bees evaporate some of it. A colony with eight full frames needs nothing at all, and the syrup you would have given it is better spent on the light one.

How much a colony needs

It depends on the winter. A long cold one with no flying weather from November to March asks for twenty to twenty-five kilos and more in continental climates; a mild maritime winter where the bees fly on warm January days can be managed on fifteen. Southern-hemisphere beekeepers in temperate Australia and New Zealand face the same arithmetic in April and May. Local associations publish their figure; your own records, which colonies came through light and which came through heavy, will refine it within two seasons.

Thick, thin, and when each

• 2:1 syrup, two parts sugar to one of water by weight, is the autumn feed. It is close to what the bees need to store, so they cap it quickly and the brood nest is disturbed less.
• 1:1 syrup is the spring feed, and a different decision entirely: it imitates a flow, and the queen and the wax builders respond to it. It is for building a colony or drawing foundation, not for wintering.
• Fondant goes directly over the cluster in winter when a colony is found light and it is too cold for syrup. It is a rescue, and a colony that needed it is a colony whose August reading was missed or ignored.
• Pollen substitute is a late-winter question, for colonies raising brood before there is forage, and only where the records show the build-up stalling for want of it.

When to stop

Bees have to reduce syrup and cap it, and they cannot do that in a cluster. Once night temperatures settle below about ten degrees Celsius the syrup sits in the feeder or, worse, sits uncapped in the comb and ferments. So feeding finishes while the days are still warm, which in much of the northern temperate zone means September into early October, and in the south, March into April. The date is not the point; the temperature is.

Feed in the evening to discourage robbing, use an internal feeder so the syrup is not offered to every wasp in the district, and do not feed during a flow, because syrup stored in a super is not honey and cannot be sold as it.

The record is the next decision

The feeding record sits next to the inspection that prompted it, so the following spring you can see which colonies were fed, how much they were given, and whether it made any difference. Colonies that came through heavy after no feed are the ones on the good site; colonies that needed feeding two years running on the same forage are telling you about their queens. That is how a feeding record turns into a management record, and it is why the feeding module ties every feed to a hive and a date rather than to a weekend in September.