I went up the my parents with the intent to buy some insurance for the bees in the form of giving them some sugar mush as I did last year. “Sugar Mush” is a quick and dirty substitute for fondant. Fondant, aka fudge, is used by some beekeepers as source of food for the bees that they can access late in the Winter/early Spring since they can lick the solid fondant but wont feed off of syrup when it is that cold. I tried making fondant, but it was a lot of work and kind of risky since you have a pot full of sugar at the soft ball stage… something that Alton Brown described once as “Culinary Napalm”. So last year I through some simple syrup, a little honey, some no cornstarch confectionary sugar and regular table sugar in a mixer (with a little bit of Honey-B-Healthy for taste) and mushed it all up. They mush actually stayed mushier and the bees liked it fine.
I repeated that recipe this year, though I had to make much more (I think about 15 lbs in the end) and went out the bee yard to give it to the bees. Last Fall I had placed an empty hive body on top of the inner cover of each hive, filled it with wool, and placed the outer cover on top before wrapping them all with tar paper. The plan was to take the outer cover off, remove the wool, and slap on the sugar mush over the hole in the inner cover so that the bees can nibble on it without having to leave their hives.
The plan fell apart as I took the top off of Orange to find an empty box. I had apparently not added wool to all of the boxes. Oops. Furthermore, there was no sign of bees despite several raps and kicks. I think they died.
Purple did have a box full of wool, and its bees were right under the inner cover waiting to greet me as I took off the wool and then slapped on the sugar mush over it so that they wouldn’t greet me to warmly! Green, Blue, Dark Green and the nucs were much the same. I had not put wool in Red since I had apparently left a feeder in place and the bees were much fewer in number at the inner cover hole. Yellow also lacked wool and the bees again were fewer in number. I am not sure if they truely had smaller populations or if they were just farther away from the inner cover since it was colder at the top without the wool insulation.
Well, now I have evidence that the wool is useful as opposed to just theory. And if I don’t loose any more hives I will still be doing very well.
