late winter bee feeding — Beekeeping How to

These honeybees are running out of winter supplemental food. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Late Winter Feeding

It’s early March 2020, a time to check my honey bee colonies to make sure they still have enough food to get them into spring.

This is the first year since I started keeping bees 10 years ago that I not only left all of the honey on the hives last fall, but I fed them supplemental sugar. Three times. This winter has been very mild so bees have been out flying looking for something to do and consuming additional honey, and supplemental sugar, for flight fuel.

As I checked my colonies earlier today, I was surprised to find most of them at the end of their supplemental food. Yet again!

Since I didn’t have extra sugar cakes made and rain is expected in a day, I gave them the emergency sugar feeding. Emergency feeding is basically providing sugar on a piece of newspaper. In my case, I gave them the remnants of sugar cakes.

Loose sugar with pollen substitute on a strip of newspaper. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Nothing fancy but this way they won’t starve, something that often happens this time of year.

Here is another colony with the remnants of the last sugar cakes on the left. They are bringing in pollen so they haven’t touched the substitute pollen on the right. If you look closer, the bees on the right are on pieces of sugar and pollen substitute, not on the pollen substitute powder.

Another bee colony running out of winter food. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

The leftover sugar cake pieces are hard and not accessible to the bees so I gave them a newspaper serving of easier to reach sugar and pollen substitute.

Sugar cakes on the top of a hive help absorb winter moisture. When they get rock hard, though, bees can’t get to the sugar. I usually spray the sugar cakes with water to rehydrate them.

Dinner is served! (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

One more colony fed with this emergency sugar feeding. This can’t provide for bees all winter but it will keep them fed until they can find flowers producing both nectar and pollen this spring.