coild-snow-feeding

Dan,
I love being able to wake up and look at the mountains. We are located just at the Northern edge of the Catskill Mountains and Catskill State Park and Forest Preserve. It is a great place for kids to grow up hunting, fishing and enjoying the outdoors.
I found over the years that most of my colony loses were generally in late winter / early spring when the colony was raising brood again and we still get some very cold weather. I started wrapping my hives with felt paper to increase solar gain during this time when the sun is getting stronger. I still found that a cluster would sometimes get separated from stores and or off to the south / southwest side of the hive up against the inner cover. If I opened the hives up I disturbed the cluster and the center hole in the inner cover was in the wrong place to feed.
I started placing empty boxes on top of the hives, which allows me to open the hives up and not disturb the cluster. I can place feed where I want to so that the cluster can use them. It is not a perfect system, but it has reduced my winter loses significantly. My home yard was over saturated with colonies this summer with 30. Add to that the poor nectar flows and this yard went into winter with very little stores on most of the hives. I did not get to feed till late October / early November, which is very late for here. With all of that I have lost 8 of 30 hives here, almost all due to simple starvation. No Stores left and separated from stores / feed completely during cold weather.
What you see on the paper in the hives is my winter set up. I place paper on the top bars and put granular sugar on the paper. This serves, two purposes extra feed and moisture control. In the spring, I place pollen substitute on the sugar and the bees take the powder very well this way. The pictures range from November to April, or so with this setup. I have found that on a sunny day with temps in the mid 20’s and warmer the bees will use either syrup feeders or the sugar on paper.
When I have purchased packages they have been from Better Bee or through our club that buys into a truck load.
I started 10 years ago with Italians, then into NWC, the only queens / packages that I have introduced lately have been Russians over the last 6 years or so.
However, I mainly do splits and allow my colonies to raise their own queens.

[ March 10, 2006, 09:27 AM: Message edited by: MountainCamp ]

hehe

in some other places I've seen one of the smiley drinking a beer and the best is the one that can only be described as
"ROFLMAO" (rolling on floor laughing my butt off)

I can see instances where they would fit in nicely

BTW: how are your bees doing?
Mine are rockin
I'm getting a few nuc's from tarheel bee in a couple of weeks

Dave

oh yea
setting some swarm traps tommorrow

[ March 11, 2006, 10:45 PM: Message edited by: drobbins ]