I dislike feeding white refined sugar to the bees, I really do and I'm trying to find a way to manage some amount of honey for our household and to leave enough for the bees. I am trying to manage this by not expanding the Body of the Colony = the hive by excess supering, nadiring, spacing.
But since I'm feeding them with sugar now to prepare them for the winter I decided to mix Nettle Tea with the Sugar Syrup to enrich it with all the minerals from the Nettle leaves.
In the photo above one can see that the sugar syrup is colored now by the Nettle Tea. All Honey has some kind of color to it because of all the minerals in it.
I'm observing my ladies daily on the hive entrance and through the observation windows. They are so powerful, they have such strong sense of purpose unlike us humans who seem to be lost most of their life.
I think naively that I'm helping them but in truth it is them helping me find The Way.
They are utterly enjoying working on an entirelly naturally built comb. It is how they wanted it to be. It is them who decoded what cell size is placed where on every single comb and there are so many different cell sizes on those combs. Why do beekeepers keep placing mono-cell wax foundations into their hives? Makes me sad.
Like your thinking about feeding! We have a homebuilt TBH along with two ordinary hives. This summer we harvested 300 kg apples in our garden. Only fine samples and without pesticides. Most of it is now in bottles. Only pressed apples, no water, and pasteurised to be possible to keep in roomtemperatur for very long time.
ReplyDeleteHave an idea; Since there is no fructose in plain sugar we plan to mix a little of our applejuice (äppelmust) into the sugar/water-food for the winter. As far as we know there must be a better mix for the bees to feed on during the winter (read artikel written by Tobias Olofsson in the last paper from SBR: Bitidningen nr 10 ). We also let our TBH-bees keep most of their own collected honey. We like to hear your opinion about the apple-idea!