September 2026
Feeding Time by Alan Riach
You will probably have harvested your summer honey in preparation for feeding in the last week of August/first week of September. The bees managed to get a final harvest of Himalayan Balsam, which has given a reasonable summer harvest. It doesn’t look like there has been much heather, although the bees have found some alternatives.
Some of you may be beside farms growing Phacelia and the bees appreciate its flowers. However, Phacelia is grown as a green manure cover crop (improves organic biomass in the soil) and farmers will often cut it before it flowers.
There may be some colonies producing new queens by supersedure and indeed it is the colonies which supersede rather than swarm that we should be breeding from rather than from those overkeen to produce queen cells.
As always, you will find that the bees will have super frames in various states of completion, part capped, etc. If there is honey that is very unripe or of which you are unsure, you can “double extract”. First, put all frames through the extractor without uncapping. The uncapped, unripe honey will quickly fly out. Collect this and feed it back to the bees once all your supers have been taken off and the bees will store it down in the broodbox. Now uncap the frames and extract the ripe honey for use. Although this double handling may sound labour intensive, it isn’t really, as the first time through the extractor without uncapping is very quick. However, if you are using a tangential extractor, be gentle as the uncapped honey applies quite a force on the frames. However, if you have checked with a refractometer and think the uncapped honey is ripe enough, then you can uncap as usual and use all of the honey. Refractometers are now inexpensive (under £30) but do check that it is a honey refractometer. Digital refractometers are now available, but they are very expensive and not any better than normal optical instruments.
When you remove all the supers, be sure to check how much food is left in the brood box. If not much, then immediately give them their winter feed. It is very easy to lose a populous colony by suddenly stripping it of food.
Now is the time to give the bees their autumn feed so that they can lay down sufficient stores for winter.
A hive should go into winter with at least 18kg of stores. In a single broodbox system, this is a very full brood box (8 BS Deep frames absolutely full, leaving only 3 frames to accommodate bees and stored pollen). Beginners are always advised to “heft” the hive to assess its weight. However, hefting is a rather imprecise instruction, especially for the inexperienced. Until you have a good idea of what a fully loaded hive should feel like, you can make yourself a simple weighing set-up as shown in the SBA website Tech Data sheet 21.
See https://scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Hive-weighing-method1.pdf
As mentioned above, 18 kg of stores means that a single brood box is pretty full. This was one reason why the late Ian Craig devised the 8 + 8 system – two brood boxes with 8 frames in each, penned in with 2 dummies in each box.
See Ian Craig’s My Beekeeping Year on the SBA website: https://scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MyBeekeepingYear.pdf
How much to feed? I usually find that a portion of syrup made up with about 9 or 10 kg of sugar (about 12 or 13 litres of syrup) brings the hive up to about the correct level of stores but, of course, it depends on how much they have already stored away in their brood box. This year some of the hives are quite light so perhaps they will need rather more feed than usual. Note: homemade syrup made with 10kg of sugar is equivalent to about 13.5kg of proprietary bee feed (proprietary feeds are about 75% sugar). This year the EMBA bulk purchase of proprietary feed is being delivered in 16kg box-bags, so one box should be more than adequate for a hive. However, offer them feed until they are satisfied. Proprietary bee feed is fairly expensive compared to making up syrup using household sugar and usually ends up costing about £2.50 per kg of sugar content (you are also paying for the 25% water). Household sugar is about 83p per kg this year (Farmfoods with discount vouchers). However, proprietary feed is very much more convenient, and the EMBA Committee obtains very good prices by purchasing in bulk.
If making up your own syrup, use 550 to 600ml of water per kg of sugar – that will make about 1.25 litres of syrup. I usually add some thymol to prevent sugar mould forming if the bees are slow to take it down (proprietary syrup doesn’t need this). To dose with thymol, make up a stock solution of thymol with 50g of thymol crystals to 250ml of surgical spirit and use 0.5ml of this stock solution per litre of syrup. Use bulk rapid feeders to let the bees take down the feed and ripen it quickly. If you do not have full-size feeders, the 6-litre “English” feeder is a good compromise placed on the crown board inside an empty super. Put a small stone or piece of slate on the lid to prevent bee pressure from dislodging the cone/lid and allowing bees to drown. Busy bees pushing and jostling produce surprising forces.
