GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Category: Bee TV

Winter Bee Check & Sugar Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video

Getting your honeybees through winter is a challenge. We feed our bees sugar in the form of a sugar cake, (sugar cake recipe below video) and show you in this video how to feed your bees sugar in the winter.

Note: I know use the Mountain Camp method of winter sugar feeding, but the video below is a good visual on checking your bees in winter.

Another benefit of sugar cakes on top of the hive is that they sugar absorbs moisture, reducing the chance of condensation forming on top of the hive and raining down on your bees, killing them.

We use these insulated inner covers in the winter, which help greatly in reducing condensation. So the combination of a winter cover and sugar cakes, I believe, really helps with moisture buildup in the hive.

Many books talk bout using fondant in winter, but I’ve found it is hard to make, and I’m not sure what the exact benefits it has over just plain sugar cakes, which are super simple to make with re-useable foil pans you buy at the store. We add a homemade essential oil mix to the cakes.

Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:

February 25, 2012
Sugar Cake Recipe Winter Beekeeping 101 Video
Here’s a video on how to make sugar cakes to feed your bees in winter. Overwintering your honeybees is challenge, here is one way I help the bees overwinter, feeding them sugar cakes with this recipe. You can make these at home. I use foil pans you can buy at the grocery store.

Note: I know use the dry sugar aka Mountain Camp method of providing sugar to honeybees in the winter. Watch our dry sugar Mountain Camp video here.

The sugar cake recipe:
- put 5 pounds of sugar in a large mixing bowl
- add 7.5 ounces of water
- add a teaspoon or two of essential oil mix if you choose
- mix together and then spread out in a 9×13 or similar foil pan
- allow to dry overnight
- take off the inner cover of the hive
- carefully turn the cake upside down onto a thin plastic or wood board
- slide the sugarcake onto the top of the hive, and either put on either a shim or an insulated inner cover, and then the outer cover.
Here are some photos of how to make sugar cakes for bees.

You can add a homemade honeybee essential oil mix to the sugar cake recipe, you can see the essential oil recipe here. Update: I know buy the pre-mixed essential oil mix, its not that expensive and saves time.

To put these cakes on top of your hive, you must use a spacer – shim, or an insulated inner cover.

There are many opinions on how to get your bees through the winter, this is one way we make sure our honeybees have enough food to get through the winter. What I like about sugarcakes is that the cakes absorb moisture in the hive, which reduces or prevents condensation in the hive.

Many beekeeping books say you should open the hives only when it is 45-50F, but I’ve found if you act quickly, you can pop the top of the hive to slide in sugarcakes when the temperature is in the 30s. Obviously you aren’t going to do a hive inspection at 30F, but you have a few seconds to open the inner cover an add sugar above the supers.

Again, I think the dry sugar method is much better now, check it out here.

Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:

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February 18, 2012
Harvest Honey with a Bee Escape – GF Video

Here’s how we use a bee escape to harvest honey. When you harvest honey from your beehive, you need to get the bees out of the honey super ( the box of frames that has honey it it, usually the topmost super ). You can do this several ways; commercial beekeepers remove the bees from the honey super with a blast of air, you can use a fume board, which you put on top of the honey super to drive the bees out of that super, or you can use a bee escape. Watch our video how to harvest honey using a fume board here

A bee escape is basically a one way door that you slide in between the honey super and the top brood super. You leave it there for a day or two, and when you take off the honey super, it will be empty of bees. Watch our video here on how to remove bees from a honey super using a bee escape

I have found that leaving the bee escape on the beehive for 2 days is better than overnight. You will always have some bees still in the honey super, but that is a lot easier than removing a lot of bees from the honey super. Some hives will start to draw comb if you leave it in too long.

It isn’t shown here, but in newer versions of this, I added a 5/8″ upper entrance hole to the escape to take the place of the entrance on the inner cover, which we have covered in tape.

Here is the double three way bee escape I made. I based it on several on the internet. The hardest part is cutting the angle cuts of each piece of wood. the cut are either 30 degrees or 60 degrees, depending on how you set up your saw. The gaps between the sides of the triangle are at least 3/8′ wide. I used regular window screen to cover this. The outer pieces of wood are 12.5″ long, the inner pieces are 7.75″ long.

Questions or comments? Let us know below, we’ll answer to the best of our ability. thx.

November 1, 2011
Beehive Ventilation Beekeeping 101 GF TV

A new video in our Beekeeping 101 aka Beginning Beekeeping video series. We had a real hot summer, like everyone else, and honeybees can overheat just like we can. So when I went out to the beehives in the heat of the summer, I made a video about how a beekeeper can ventilate or keep a beehive cool in the summer heat. If you see lots of bees climbing around you hive, it may be that the hive is too warm. Watch this beginning beekeeping video to learn more

September 8, 2011
Bait Hives, Bee Swarms and Swarm Traps, Beekeeping 101 : GardenFork.TV

I built some honey bee swarm traps, or bait hives, to try to capture any bee swarms that came out of the beehives in our beeyard. Swarm Traps, or Bait Hives are basically boxes you place around near your bees, offering them as convenient homes for new bee swarms. The bait hives – swarm traps I show you how to build here are made from old bee frames and boxes. When my neighbor called me to say there were bees flying around one of our Swarm Traps, I left work and drove over, excited to video our first swarm! And happy too that we had not lost swarm to the woods, instead we could start a new hive with it, or recombine it with the hive from where it left later in the fall. Here is the video we made for our Beekeeping 101 Beginning Beekeeping

August 2, 2011
Dead Bees? Beginning Beekeeping : GardenFork.TV

When you walk up to a hive and see no activity, you immediately think, why are my bees dead. Watch here as we do an early spring beehive inspection to see what’s up

You can watch all of our beekeeping 101 how to raise honeybees videos here.

April 19, 2011
Bear Proofing Your Beeyard : Beginning Beekeeping Video

In this video on bear proofing your bee hive, we talk about ways to keep bears away from you beehives. The largest danger to our beehives are bears. They are very common here in NW CT and we don’t want them wrecking our beehives.

We read an article on bear proofing one’s hives in Bee Culture link here, by Ross Conrad, author of Natural Beekeeping, and have used a few of the bear proofing methods he wrote about for our hives.

We are in our sophmore year of beekeeping, and don’t purport to be experts on beekeeping yet, but we wanted to document our first years of beekeeping and share them with you all.

We have used this and other electric fences to bear proof the beeyard with good results. Your results may vary. Be very careful when dealing with bears. If there is one in your yard, get in the house, and get your dogs in the house too.

Full disclosure, Premier 1 supplies sent us the electric fence for free. I think its a good product.

Beekeepers: what methods do you use to safeguard your hives? let us know below

September 10, 2010
How to Requeen a beehive : GardenFork.TV : Beginning Beekeeping

Learn how to requeen a beehive in this beginning beekeeping video. Requeening the hive is not rocket science, but you do need to know how a few things when you do this. This Beekeeping video will show you how to replace the queen in your beehive, or at least how we do it. As with many things in life, this is how we do it, others may do it differently.

You replace the queen in a beehive when you want to improve the hive’s characteristics or when the original queen of the beehive has died for some reason. You also requeen a beehive to keep it from swarming.

We are going to try requeening our hives in late August to prevent swarming the following spring. I’m told that queens replaced in the fall will not swarm in springtime, so we’ll see. Of course we’ll make a video about that.

June 13, 2010
How to move a Beehive : GardenFork.TV Beginning Beekeeping

We decided to move a beehive, so I learned how to move a beehive, and now we’ll show you how we moved the it. Moving a beehive is not hard, watch this Beginning Beekeping Series video and learn how.

Have you moved a beehive? Please tell us below:

May 3, 2010
Winter Fondant Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video

In late winter, when you have a warm day, say 44-50 F, its a great opportunity to quickly check your honeybees and beehive. In this beekeeping 101 video, we show how we open the hive and place some fondant and a grease patty in the hive to get the bees through the last bit of winter. Links to more of our beekeeping videos at end of this post.

Note: Since making this video, we have changed our methods and are no longer using the styrofoam outer covers or fondant, but its still a good video on caring for your bees in winter. Watch our dry sugar feeding videos here.

Your honeybees may or may not have enough food stores to make it thru this last part of winter, but I am of the mind that it pays to put in some fondant. Other beekeepers will have differing opinions on this and many other practices related to beekeeping. It is too cold to feed your honeybees sugar syrup in late winter, feed them fondant.

We have produced this series of Beginning Beekeeping Videos to document our first years of beekeeping to show people how fun it really is and to demystify it, and to spread the word on raising honey bees. We are not beekeeping experts, we are still learning. Tell us your experiences below and we can all learn more.

Bee fondant and Grease Patty recipes are based on information from Cass of WVBeekeeper’s Blog and the BeeSource forums . A big thank you to Cass for his writings.

Fondant from WVBeekeeper:

Fondant Bee Candy

Fondant bee candy can be fed directly to the bees once cooled. Fondant is a good food source for mini-mating nucs because there is no drowning involved when you have a small amount of bees. It is also common to use this recipe in small quantities to plug the hole on a Queen Cage.

> 4 parts (by volume) white sugar
> 4 parts (by volume) 2:1 Syrup or HFCS
> 3 parts (by volume) water

Boil water and slowly add the syrup and sugar until dissolved. Continue heating until the mixture reaches 238°F (114°C). Without mixing allow the solution to cool until it is slightly warm to the touch. Then begin to mix and aerate the solution. As you do this the color should lighten. Pour into shallow dishes or mold and save for later use. I prefer to make the fondant thin enough to where I can work it into an empty frame of drawn comb.

Grease Patties:

I made my own based on reading thru the Bee Source forums and WVBeekeepers blog.

2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening

4 cups white sugar

10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil

1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.

mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.

you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.

Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

March 9, 2010
Preparing for Winter – Beekeeping 101 Video

In this Beginning Beekeeping show, we get the hive ready for winter. Raising bees is a great hobby, and here we show how we prepare the beehive for the coming winter. Below the recipe are links to our other beekeeping vids and sources.

Grease Patties:

I made my own based on reading thru the various online forums and blogs.

2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening

4 cups white sugar

10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil

1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.

mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.

you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.

Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

November 19, 2009
Beginning Beekeeping : Fall Feeding and Varroa Mite Treatment

This is our first year raising honeybees in our new beehives, and I wanted to make how to raise bees beekeeping videos to show you all that you too can raise bees. We are not the experts here, but one learns by doing. So we do things, and we make beekeeping videos.

The sugar syrup we feed the bees in the fall is a 2:1 mixture. 10 lbs of sugar to 5 pounds of water. 1 pint of water weighs about 1 lb, so we heat up 5 pints of water and mix in 10 pounds of white table sugar. Do not add sugar to boiling water, boil the water and then take the pot off the stove, put it on a heat proof platter and use a immersion blender to mix in the sugar.

The first gallon of the fall sugar feeding has Fumagilin added to help the bees thru the winter.

We are using powdered sugar for our varroa mite treatment. watch the video to see how we do this.

November 1, 2009
Beginning Beekeeping : Hive Inpsection

As part of our series of beginning beekeeping videos, here we did a hive inspection this summer. Bees are easy to raise, you just have to maintain a few things thru the season, and a few hive inpsections are necessary. Watch here how how are learning to raise bees and become beekeepers.

October 8, 2009
Our First Honey Harvesting – Beekeeping 101 GF Video

Here is our first honey harvesting video where we show you how to use a comb knife and an extractor to extract the honey from the honeycomb.

Our teacher, Jim, sent us an email after he saw our video with the following comments. Jim has strong opinions, like most beekeepers, I agree with most of what he says here, but not all of it. Again we are beginner beekeepers, so we can and do make mistakes. my goal here is to show people that they too can raise bees. So here is Jim’s take on our first honey harvesting video.

Offered in what I hope is noticed to be a TOUNGUE-IN-CHEEK and FRIENDLY

tone, are the following comments from your peers, as summarized by me:

1) Putting an undrawn frame of foundation into a hive in September is a dead

give-away that not only did you fell asleep in class, but you also failed to

do the reading. Bees are very unlikely to drawn comb after the middle of

August. Much better to simply replace the extracted frames when you are

done extracting.

2) The “purpose of the smoker” is not to drive the bees down in between the

frames. That level of smoke was last used by Richard Nixon against anti-war

protestors. The purpose of the smoker is to simply block alarm pheromones

from alarming other bees, and can be used sparingly.

3) When you are fully suited, veiled, and gloved, the bees can fly around

without endangering you. There is no reason to be concerned that they take

flight when you are brushing them off frames.

4) Brushing should be done with the frames upside down, so that any bees

with their heads in cells will not be bent backwards or pulled apart. Cells

slant upwards within the frame, so brushing from bottom of frame to top (by

bushing with the frame upside down) is much easier on you and the bees. If

your sound effect was the actual brushing, you also need to use much shorter

strokes, so as to avoid “rolling” bees on the frame. A fume board and some

Bee-Quick might have made the job quicker, easier, and sting-free, but I’m

not going to shove specific choices at anyone.

5) “Finding the queen” should not wait until frames are hanging on the frame

rest, as the queen might fall outside the hive. One wants to inspect frames

as one removes them, while holding them over the hive. The odds of the

queen being on frames of honey are small, but they are non-zero.

what do you all think? let us know here:

October 7, 2009
Beginning Beekeeping : How to assemble bee hive frames

Part of our series of beginning beekeeping videos, watch as we show you how to assemble bee hive frames here.

October 7, 2009