WHY FEED — In NEW hives, the role of feeding is to help bees build new comb. It is not to fill up the hive with sugar syrup.*

In OLDER hives, the role of feeding is to make sure that the bees don’t starve if a cold snap occurs during a high egg-laying/brood-rearing time in April or early May. If the bees have plenty of honey left over from the winter, minimal supplemental feeding for 2 to 3 weeks should be sufficient. 

New Hive: feed for new comb-building—an expanding colony can exploit the spring bloom. Older Hive: feed only to avoid starvation in spring—allow bees to exhaust their winter stores.

WHY NOT TO OVERFEED — Unrestricted feeding will result in a hive that is “honey-bound” with no space available for the queen to lay eggs. If you continue to feed sugar syrup (as I did my first year) until a honey-bound hive, the bees can distort combs, which you must then sculpt back to a uniform depth.

Also, you risk having a late-June or July swarm. My first-year swarm and subsequent swarms practically every year occurred within seven days either way of June 30 and likely resulted from overfeeding sugar syrup in spring.

A new hive that is fed sugar syrup must be constantly monitored to ensure that the bees are not distorting combs by building some patches of deeper cells and other areas of shallow cells to compensate for the deeper ones.

Bees spend a large amount of time and energy building comb (it requires 6 to 8 pounds of sugar or honey to produce 1 pound of wax). Feeding should be stopped when the hive has 10 deep combs fully built out—assuming it is a double-deep hive configuration. 

DRAWN COMB TO STORE — Beekeepers who plan to increase the number of hives in their apiary can pull frames of drawn comb and store them, then continue feeding to encourage the bees to draw more comb.

To store drawn comb, you can freeze frames of fresh or used comb in your home freezer a few at a time, then put them in a sealed storage bin to protect from wax moths, ants, and rodents, and store in a cool location such as a garage or basement.

FEEDING NUCS — The program for nucs is no different. Only feed as much as is needed.

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*Note: Review “Class 7: Spring Management” in the EJB Beginning Beekeeping Course to find details on how to make spring syrup and what kind of feeders can be used.