It is March 10 and my bees have emerged from their winter slumber, at least long enough to get some water and see if I have put out any food for them. I like to give them some honey water, cheap honey, mixed with a little water. I may put a handful of little clean twigs, in a shallow bowl, so they do not flounder.

Make sure you put the bowl away from human activity, you would be amazed at how many bees show up for the festivities.  If you are just starting a hive then you can but the shallow bowl in the hive behind the falseback. There is a small gap under the falseback that the bees can go under to get to the honey. 

For an established hive I like to feed the bees away from the hives, this reduces robbing activity. I had made the mistake of trying to feed a struggling colony at their hive one fall and during the frenzy, other bees overwhelmed the week colony’s defenses, and began robbing the weak hive of everything. What a colossal mistake! I felt so bad, after an hour of trying to chase the other bee’s away by spraying water at the swarming bee’s in the air, I finally gave up and had to watch the little weak colony slowly dwindle to nothing. Well that was that lesson. Another lesson is to go ahead and feed the bees. Twice I have taken too much honey in the fall and thought that when I had seen the bee’s come out in the early spring that they were doing fine, when in fact this is when they are getting low on reserves, they have used up all their honey fuel over the winter keeping warm.

During these two occasions I found the hive quiet in the spring and upon opening the hive found that the bees had completely ran out of honey reserves and the last of them were found dead with their little butts sticking out of the combs to keep warm. What a difficult thing, I felt that I had broken an agreement.

The pay off for feeding the bees in the early spring is well worth the cost of the honey. It will give the bees a jump-start so they can get things rolling for the spring flower blooms. I feed the bees honey because I think that the bee’s systems are not set up to do sugar water. This is not confirmed and commercial bee keepers use sugar water, but it just makes sense to me to use honey for feeding.

After talking with Gunther Hawk I have decided to do single comb harvests during the summer and fall and to leave the bees with all the honey for the winter. In the spring, I can remove most of the honey that over wintered. The bees are much more willing to part with this honey. This is really a great concept, it insures that the bees have all the honey they need to over winter and it takes away the difficult guess work of how much honey to harvest and how much to leave the bees.