Seattle Urban Honey beekeeper dispatches: our hives are hungry. The blackberry bushes are just about to bloom, as are the locust trees, but they are waiting for a warm day before they open. The maple and chestnut are finished. With cool, cloudy, rainy weather still dominant, the bees are stuck at home and running low on stores.
Emergency Feeding and the Risk of Starvation
We looked through all of the hives last weekend and found that every one needed feeding — they were in danger of starvation. The bee populations are booming, which means food demand is high. However, we did not have honey supers on any hive except the one surviving hive from last summer (at a yard in Bellevue). Feeding sugar syrup is the right response, but only when there is no honey super on the hive — otherwise the bees may store the syrup as if it were honey.
A Three-Way Hive Split
The one surviving hive from last summer was so populous that we decided to do a three-way split rather than simply feed it. We went through the hive and found the old queen in the third box. She was relocated to a box of bees and brood and placed back on the original hive site. The remaining bees and brood were divided into two roughly equal groups, each receiving a new purchased queen in a screened cage with a hard candy plug.
The candy plug method gives the bees time to adjust to the new queen scent before she is released. By the time the bees eat through the candy, they should accept her. Each new split got an additional empty box and a feeder loaded with two gallons of 1:1 sugar syrup. As a result, the property host — who had lost three of his four hives last winter — will now have three strong hives rebuilding through the summer.