Slight panic over the weekend. We checked the bees last week to see how much syrup had been taken down after our faux-pas with the feeder. And the answer? None (again!) We drizzled more over them, around the opening in the crown board and poured some over the seams of bees. Still no interest. Robin then came around with a feeder made to his own design. Apparently, our eke was putting too great a distance between bees and feeder.
We were using the eke (made so proudly by Liam!) because of the apiguard and have now removed this, cellophaned it and will put back on once the feeding is complete. (Thank you for your comments by the way - this has reassured me that feeding should take precedence over the varroa for now).
Anyway, the new feeder has had an instant result. We put the feeder on around lunchtime on thursday and by the time we left for a weekend away at around 6 that evening, all of the syrup had gone and we had refilled it with another gallon of syrup. On our return on Sunday evening, they had finished all of that and so we refilled again this morning. (I will ask Robin if I can post a photo as we will definitely try to reproduce this for ourselves next year).
Now I am just waiting to see how much syrup the bees will take down. So far, we have fed 1.5 gallons.
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Pia, glad you've managed to sort things out. Are you having this Indian Summer in Somerset? Are the bees drawing comb at all?
ReplyDeleteI suppose bees will certainly die of starvation whereas they'll be stressed and more prone to disease if varroa rises but not necessarily die.
Our lecture last night was a talk about wintering the bees - it was interesting hearing the different ways of ensuring that their stores and population numbers are sufficient for example, putting shallow (super)boxes below the brood box for those extra bees that are (hopefully) being reared at the moment.
Of course, varroa treatment was a hot topic.
So much to learn....