Sugar Sugar

It has been on the cooler side in Brooklyn ever since we brought the bees back. I decided that because the girls have to create their own honeycomb this year that I would feed them. I got this sweet feeder for Christmas this year so I filled it up with some simple sugar syrup. Two days later I took a peak to find that it was gone. So I made two more cups and closed the lid. They ate that too. I had to go to the store and buy a 5 pound bag of sugar. It seems like every two days they have eaten what I’ve given them.  I also sprinkled some pollen in the actual hive so that they can collect it and eat it for protein.I’ve read that the bees will stop eating it once they are able to gather their own supply.

I have no idea what I am doing to be honest. I know that it takes a lot of energy for bees to make honey comb. I also know that they have 10 empty frames to make comb for so it seems like they need to eat something. I hope that the weather stays dry and over 60 degrees long enough for the girls to really start to capitalize on the high pollen that weather.com keeps alerting me about.

Feeding time

Hopefully I can do an official hive inspection some time this week or weekend.

Cleaning House

In preparation for the bee package to arrive, I had to do a little bit of clean up. As some of you may remember, last year’s hive was riddled with small hive beetles , was a victim of robbing and was a bit of a mess. So the other weekend I took apart the hive and washed it down. I scraped away any wax and propolis buildup from the sides of the hive. I took out all of the frames and saw that over the winter, some web forming insect may have moved in. I decided that this year I wanted to start from scratch so I got rid of all of the old comb.

Scraping away old comb

I took some of the old frames and put them in the freezer so that any remaining nuisances would be killed. I know, this isn’t the first time some strange bee related thing was in my freezer.

I also build some new frames. I had to nail together the four sides and put what’s called frame foundation. This is a bit of a blueprint for the bees to build comb on.

New foundation

backyard beekeeping

Luckily it was a lovely day and I had some extra hands helping me out. Hopefully the spruced up hive will be a good home to my girls this year.