i headed out to my be yard which is 20 miles round trip to check on them. my plan was to inspect the feed situation. i been feeding them since DEC.1 dry sugar. not until recently they have been eating sugar. My hives today looked like the pic below! 1/4 to 3/4 eaten. i wanted to add sugar but did not know how to add the sheet of news paper and sugar with all the bees clustered around the sugar.
so i left with out adding feed! what would u have done?
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Fixed it for ya !(Buzzbee)
Depends on how often you visit the hive. They have used only 1/3 of the sugar since early December. So you could probably wait another month at least before adding more sugar. But if you wanted to add more now it would be easy. Just lay a folded piece of paper on top of where the bee cluster is, overlapping slightly the rest of the newspaper and add your sugar. Spritz some water on the sugar so it will clump and not fall between frames.
Not sure why you were reluctant to add more. If you lay paper on the bees, most of them will move down or out. You might crush a few but that's the price of feeding the hive.
I've used coffee can lids to mound sugar onto before. Bees don't eat the plastic very quickly so it says put all winter long. Just shovel some more sugar on when it's getting low. Or do what Frameshift is suggesting.
Or you could go to that big box store (you know the one) and buy a box of fondant, knead it a bit, then put fondant pizzas on there. I live in Mississippi so we can liquid feed almost all winter but I have used the fondant.
Where can u find fondant ?
Bakery Department
Check the list of ingredients
Tommyt
**i wanted to add sugar but did not know how to add the sheet of news paper and sugar with all the bees clustered around the sugar.**
puff a little SMOKE on them--just ever so little--they will move-and you can rearrange your feed station-- 8-)
sometimes it is a good idea to move the feed towards the bees-even if you dont add to it--RDY-B