Homestead Rules – Learning the Rules the Hard Way

Normally bees eat the honey they have made and stored in their hives during the summer but if they don’t have enough honey to last until spring, you can supplement with a candy or sugar board. You can buy them (about $20) or you can make them yourself. Here’s how we did it for only the cost of the sugar.

Frame Materials:

1/2″ hardware cloth

scrap lumber – we used a 1×6 that we cut in half to make two 1x3s

poultry staples

screws

Candy materials

8 pounds of sugar

1.5 cups of water

1/2 (read: half) tablespoon of vinegar (white or apple cider)

winter pollen patty (optional)

To build the frame:

1. First you need to measure the length and width of your hive. Now cut two pieces of wood for the length of your hive body long and two other pieces at the right width. Cut them with a 45 degree angle at the ends. The angled ends aren’t totally required (you could just leave them straight) but the angles help the box fit together more tightly.

2. Using screws, attach the boards to form a box. But be warned: using knit gloves to while doing so can lead to unintended consequences:

3. Time to add an entrance/exit hole. Find the center of one of the shorter boards (the front and back pieces). With a 5/8 inch drill bit, make the hole near the bottom of the board. (When placed on the hive, this hole will sit just peeking out from the telescoping lid so that is why you want it placed towards the bottom of the board and not centered.)

4. Now for a bit of “do as I say, not as I do”. We cut the hardware cloth to the exact size of the box with about an inch extra. We then used poultry staples to attach the cloth to the box. This is NOT what we will do when we build more of these. Why not? Because the staples and hardware cloth don’t let it sit snug against the hive body when we put them on the hive.

Instead of doing it this way, next time we will cut the hardware cloth a few inches bigger and fold it up into the box. Then we’ll staple it to the inside of the box which will allow the wooden frame to sit flush onto the hive. So, do as I say, not as I did.

Oh, and make sure you attach the hardware cloth so that the entrance/exit hole is closest to the cloth. Otherwise it will sit under the telescoping lid and the bees won’t be able to use it.

And that’s it. The frame is built. In all, it took about an hour to build two boxes but that included cutting a 1×6 down into two 1x3s since that is what we had laying around.

To make the candy:

1. First line your frame with newspaper. Some people also use wax paper but since I can get extra newspaper for free from the recycling center that’s what we used. Only one layer of newspaper is needed since the bees will eat through it to get to the sugar.

2. Add 1/2 (half) tablespoon  of vinegar to 1.5 cups of water. The vinegar helps prevent mold. Add the water/vinegar solution to 8 pounds of granulated sugar. Mix well. The sugar will become moist and lumpy but not soaking wet.

3. Now, this step is entirely optional and can only be completed it your bowl is shiny. But I highly recommend it since it makes your sugar sweeter. Okay here it is: Spend about 5 minutes making funny monkey faces at yourself while laughing hysterically.

Again, this step is not required but is recommended.

4. Plop the mixture into the frame and smooth it around. Leave some space around the entrance/exit hole so that the bees have room to come and go.

5. We decided to include a winter pollen patty for them as another food source. Using a glass bowl, I made a hole to put the pollen patty into. Someone used a piece of a 2×4 board to do this, other people just pushed the sugar out of the way with a spatula. Whatever works for you.

6. If you’re using a pollen patty, put it into your candy board. Our patties were pretty big so we cut one in half and put it in the newly created space for it. (We got our patties from a local bee supply store called Dadant & Sons.)

And now you have a sugar board! You don’t have to wait until the sugar hardens to put it into the hive; it’s ready to go now.

Placing the candy board:

1. To place the board, remove the hive lid and inner cover. In this photo, you can see the bees eating the pollen patty we put in the hive a few weeks ago. This is the weaker of our two hives and the fact that they are at the top of the hive already isn’t a great sign. We’re hoping the candy board and pollen patties give them all the extra food they need.

2. Place the candy board onto the hive with the hole in the front. Then place the inner cover back on.

3. Finally replace the outer cover. See how the candy board hole peeks out from under the lid to make an upper entrance/exit for the bees?

And now you’re all done! I am by no means even close to someone who know anything about what she is doing. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I’ll try to help.

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This post was linked to Homestead Barn Hop. To check out some other great homesteading blogs, click the button below!

This past weekend was beautiful and warm so we decided to peek at our two bee hives to see how they were doing. Going into winter, one hive had a fair amount of honey stored up but the other was struggling. We feed them some sugar water during the fall to help them beef up their supply but they still seemed a bit behind going into winter. (For those bee geeks that care, we fed a heavy syrup of 2:1 sugar to water.)

When we opened the struggling hive this weekend, we saw bees right away – not a great sign. When it gets cold, bees form a cluster in the bottom of the hive. As they hang out, trying to keep warm, they eat all the honey they have stored around them. When that honey is gone, they move up in the hive to find more food. The goal is to have them move into the very top of the hive (which contains the last of their honey supply) as spring starts and they can begin making more honey.

The weaker colony at the top of their hive

We checked the stronger hive and could see the bees down in the hive but not up top like the weaker one. Woohoo, maybe we won’t kill them both!

Now, this is where our homesteading philosophy comes in to play. It goes something like this:

1) Everyone carries their own weight – parents, kids, animals, plants. If you aren’t doing your part, you may just find yourself replaced (or have your allowance deducted, if you happen to be of the kid variety).

2) We will help animals and plants to some extent but will not coddle them. If a variety of plant doesn’t grow well for us, we aren’t going to baby it along or save the seeds for next year. If an animal is constantly sick or needs special attention, we will cull that animal. We don’t want to make more work for ourselves. We select animals and plants based on their natural abilities to succeed in our climate.

So, if we based our actions solely on these two things, we wouldn’t give the bees much help to get through the winter. Our ultimate goal is to have bees that can survive a Wisconsin winter without much intervention.

But there are some mitigating factors with these hives.

First, they were new hives without any foundation. That means the bees had to make all the honey comb they would need to store the honey and pollen. They also use the comb to raise their bee babies. Once we put them into the hive, they had to make the comb, gather nectar and pollen and start laying eggs. All this “housekeeping” work takes away from their honey making time. Next year, they will use the comb they built this summer to get a jump start on their egg laying and honey making.

Another strike against these hives was their arrival date. Normally our weather allows our area to get new bees in mid April. We ordered our bees from California. Unfortunately they had a cold, wet spring like we did here in Wisconsin. They weren’t able to produce new packages of bees until much later. We finally got our bees around the end of May – a very late start. They then had to go through the whole comb-building process which further delayed their honey production.

The package of bees we got this spring

Finally, we’re new bee keepers. That should speak for itself. The poor bees. I know there were probably things we should have done differently or didn’t do at all (or perhaps we did things we weren’t supposed to – the possibilities are endless when you are knowledgeable enough to cause lots of trouble).

Now, we knew going into this winter, we would need to feed some sugar which can be in syrup form or in a hard “candy” form. That’s just because we live in a frozen tundra that has months and months and months and months (I could go on and on….) of cold weather. They bees often don’t have enough time to make all the honey for their winter needs and for the honey thieves (AKA: bee keepers). Plus we knew these particular hives had the other problems I just mentioned.

So, the question becomes: how much help is too much? We are in mid January and one hive is close to starving. They won’t be able to make honey for themselves until sometime in June. They have been a weak hive from the very start. The other hive has outpaced them all spring and summer and probably has enough honey to last at least a few more months. The smaller hive is not going to make it without serious help. But how much is too much? How much will push us over the line of being helpful and into the realm of coddling them?

This is a question we face in many different areas of the farm. Because of our cold, wet spring, the garden struggled, particularly the longer growing plants. So can we fairly judge their performance given the hand mother nature dealt? What about the chickens that have been selectively bred over the years to get food from humans instead of foraging for themselves? If a breed turns out to be bad foragers, should we give more food or cull them from the flock to allow room for chickens who still have this skill?

Sometimes it feels like a harsh decision, particularly when it means the death of an animal if we choose to limit our involvement. Those are the times it kind of sucks to be the ones in charge. Each animal and plant is important to us and it hurts to lose any of them. So we try really hard to make an informed decision based on all the facts and unusual circumstances. Sometimes we swoop in like the cavalry, sometimes we stand back and watch. And every time we hold our breaths, hoping we made the right choice.

As for the bees, we decided each hive should get a little extra help this year but it comes with a notice that next year, it’s honey or bust.

PS: Check back on Monday to find out how we made the bees some yummy candy boards to help them survive the winter!

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This post was linked to FarmGirl Friday at Deborah Jean’s Dandelion House. Click on the button to check out some other great homesteading blogs!