Easy Beekeeping in Horizontal Hives - First Spring Inspection - Emergency Non-sugar Feeding

Presented by https://ForestBeehive.com

It’s Mar 22 and the temperatures are staying above 50°F (10° C) and the bees are out. The winter in Central Maine is starting to loosen its grip and the bees are finally getting a hint of Spring!

Today we’ll talk about our Spring inspection and feeding the bees in case their honey stores are low but first, just a brief note What Natural Beekeeping IS and What it IS NOT.

Natural Beekeeping IS NOT a carbon copy of how feral bees live in the wild. With the feral beehive in the middle of a natural tropical forest there’s no beekeeper so there’s no natural beekeeping either.

But here comes Lucy, a natural beekeeper. Lucy is serious about taking care of her favorite feral beehive by protecting it from other monkeys as well as from birds, and various other predators. Lucy loves the bees but she may not be 100% altruistic with taking care of her bees as she really enjoys her Lucy’s Wilderness Honey.

Lucy is a Natural Beekeeper because:
Natural Beekeeping IS just Beekeeping WITHOUT ANY UNNATURAL chemical or artificial crap in and around the beehives.

So Lucy here is a Natural Beekeeper for the following reasons:
(1) THERE’S NO UNNATURAL HUMAN-ENGINEERED CHEMICALS IN AND AROUND Lucy’s BEEHIVE
(2) Lucy also does not use any acids or essential oils to medicate her bees
(3) Since Lucy’s bees are not medicated, they can do what bees did for thousands of years: use natural selection to defeat any parasites on their own. And lastly, Lucy’s BEEHIVE IS within the right NATURAL HABITAT so that land and water around are unpolluted by pesticides, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides and Lucy’s bees have enough foraging in all seasons. As a result, Lucy’s bees do not need any artificial supplemental sugar feedings that adversely affect both the bees and their honey.

At our ForestBeehive apiary in Central Maine, we also have plenty of clean unpolluted land and water but, unlike Lucy’s, our winters are cold and long which makes beekeeping in cold winter climates extra challenging.

It’s Mar 22 and it’s our first Spring inspection. In the picture, I just opened the top lid of the horizontal beehive. You can see that almost 2/3 of the beehive cavity is empty and the bees have overwintered in a smaller third of the beehive topped with the brown sackcloth pillow. By mid-summer, I will gradually expand this particular beehive up to its full capacity of 20 frames as the bee colony grows explosively in summer and then in late Fall as the number of bees naturally dwindles, I will narrow down the ‘bee space’ to 7-8 frames flanked with divider boards on each side.

The sackcloth pillow on top is filled with natural wool which helps keep the bees warm in winter and also helps in absorbing extra moisture. Overwintering in a smaller space helps the bees conserve their limited resources so that they don’t have to keep a whole wide space warm like they easily did in the summer. The smaller number of winter bees can now focus their energy more productively on keeping a smaller space warm.

I had no winter losses so far. But upon inspection, I saw that one of the bee colonies was really running low on their own honey stores and I needed to feed that colony. As the bees’ health is important to me, I don’t do any supplemental sugar feedings, so for emergency feeding what do you think I feed the bees with?

I had a couple of good options for feeding: I could feed the bees with their own honey harvested in the Fall and mix it 1:1 with water.But I had a second even better option for feeding:

During Fall harvest, before uncapping the honey, I have used the extractor to spin out the uncapped honey separately and I stored it in the fridge. Uncapped honey is a partially dehydrated nectar - if it were fully dehydrated, the bees would have capped it with wax.

Uncapped honey has to be kept in the fridge because compared to matured capped honey its water content is at least twice higher and it can easily get fermented.

You may notice that as opposed to our Fall honey, the uncapped honey that was kept in the fridge got crystallized. Temperatures lower than 50°F (10°C) cause honey to crystallize. It still tastes delicious not only to the bees but to me as well.If your honey does not crystallize, it could be adulterated.

By the way, there are some beekeepers that use artificial measures to prevent honey from crystallization and I even found the strangest advice from none other than American Test Kitchen on how to prevent honey from crystallization: by adding corn syrup to honey?! That’s a total adulteration of honey: unhealthy and unsavory at the same time.

I will make another inspection in a week or so if the weather keeps above 50° F (10°C) to see if I have to add more uncapped honey to feed the bees. See you in future videos!