One Hive Clustered, One Hive... (well, you know how it is!)

Today is the 6th day since their last feeding so it was time for another feeding for the OV hive. Our temps have been in the low 40's with some days this past week being quite windy and brisk. My mild-mannered Sasha hive has perfectly clustered like the good little bees they are. But was I expecting the same for the OV hive? Oh no... Not the OV hive.

This picture has nothing to do with this
post but will certainly make you smile!

Those Russian bees were just hanging out and moving around, loving life while waiting for dinner to arrive. Since they replaced their queen this spring, they've not been the same as they were for the first year. They once were the textbook hive: rearing brood, making honey and clustering when they should be. Now they're the fun loving, full of life Russians that you expect any vodka-drinking Russian to be. So very different from the Sasha hive!

Life Cycle of a Honey Bee

The life stages of a honeybee are egg, larva, pupa and adult. Development from egg to adult takes 21 days.  

The length of these stages is set out in the table below.

Days	Task
1 - 3	Egg
4 - 9	Larvae (5 days)
10 - 21	Pupae (10 days) Cell is capped.
Adult	Once emerged, a bee performs various house duties. Read more about that at my post on The Life of a Honey Bee.

The Beauty of Pollinators

This beautiful video is by filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg who shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film "Wings of Life," inspired by the vanishing of one of nature's primary pollinators, the honeybee.

Record Keeping

Keeping track of your hives is an important aspect of successful beekeeping so after utilizing a pad of paper for the past year and a half, I finally elected to go high-tech with Beetight.com online record keeping.  I found it to be less clunky and more intuitive than the popular Hive Tracks.

The basic version is free for up to 6 hives. The Pro version is $15 per year and comes with an iPhone/iPad or Android app. The big plus for me is that you can export your data into excel so that you can keep a local backup.

So far, I'm impressed with its ease of use, allowing you to

• Easily record details of inspections and manipulations
• Record treatments and feeding
• Track colony temperament
• Record honey harvests, including records of nectar sources and batch codes.

Fondant Recipe

Making fondant for winter survival feeding is one of the most important skills you could have as a beekeeper. The bees cannot use fresh, uncured sugar syrup from a feeder or in the honeycomb during periods of cold to generate heat, but they can with fondant. I've followed this recipe supplied from Scott Seccomb of BUMBA with much success thanks to his excellent notes included as red text.  

Aluminum foil with a bit of
Mega Bee ready to go.

Have ready a sheet of unwrinkled aluminum foil with the shinny side up. I place mine on a cookie sheet that has been spread with a bit of Mega Bee that then gets incorporated into the fondant.

To feed a medium strength colony for 5 to 10 days:

Add 2 Cups sugar, 1.5 Cups water and 1/8 teaspoon Cream of Tartar to a small pot Stir only to dissolve the sugar. Use a small pot that allows for the thermometer to be submerged into the mixture for an accurate temperature reading and also makes it easier to scrape out the mixture.

Boil to 238 degrees (soft ball stage.) (This takes about 30 minutes for my stove.) Do not stir during the boil. Eventually you will tell by the could of the boil when its getting close to the desired temperature. Use a good candy-making thermometer. Boiling to 238 degrees is critical for the proper final consistency and sugar absorption.

Remove the pot from the heat and let cool to around 140 degrees. (This also takes about 30 minutes for me.) You can hasten this by a short period of refrigeration but it can cause the mixture to gum up around the edges of the cooling pot, requiring heavier mixing/scraping when stirring.

Stir until you can no longer
 see the bottom of the pot.

Once the mixture has cooled to 140 degrees, stir in 2 tablespoons of light corn syrup (Never use dark colored corn syrup) or up to 1/4 Cup of honey (bees will really devour the honey fondant) and stir until the mixture begins to turn white and you can no longer see the bottom of the pan.

Pour onto aluminum foil and cool.  If you dump too early, as soon as the mixture turns opaque, it may never firm up. If you stir too long, it will look like cake frosting and will harden like a rock. I stirred this batch just a bit too long from trying to take a picture of it with one hand while stirring with the other and ended up with it thickening way too fast! I flattened it before it cooled but it still turned out thicker than I prefer.

Once the fondant is cool you can break it up into pieces about 3-4" in diameter. Place it on the top bars of the frames, leaving room for air flow between them.

As you can see by the photo, the bees don't mind that this wasn't a perfect batch. :-)

Important to note: 

• Doubling the recipe doesn't always work. You could end up with goo or rock hard cement.
• Store extra fondant in a sealed container. Place a piece of aluminum foil on top and a wet piece of paper towel on top of that to keep it moist.
• If you use honey in your fondant do not use store bought honey which has been heated and possibly altered with who knows what, and may have Foul Brood spores in it.