Sugar brick for winter feeding

There are many ways to ensure that your bees have enough food to survive our long and harsh Pacific Northwest weather. Ideally, one would leave enough honey in the hive to keep the bees fat and happy until Spring but that's not always possible. New hives often have a hard time storing enough honey due to the resources required throughout the season to build new comb. New beekeepers also sometimes succumb to temptation and take too much honey from the bees, assuming that a few partial or full frames of honey is all they need. Sometimes, due to environmental or other factors, beehives are kept too warm, allowing the bees to stay active longer and consume more resources. Other times, the hive might make it throughout winter but starve during the Spring buildup if pollen and nectar are scarce.

Adding sugar or fondant to hives is an accepted practice in the beekeeping industry and, if done properly, can give the bees supplemental emergency food to help them get by if the hives resources are depleted. Some beekeepers use the "mountain camp" method of feeding, which basically involves pouring mounds of sugar on newspaper covering the top frames of the hive. Moisture in the hive will cause the sugar to harden, making it so the bees have a reliable source of food throughout winter. Other beeks (short for "beekeepers") prefer to use an added box known as a "candy board." This box has hardware cloth attached on the bottom to all four sides so that a beekeeper can place a sheet of newspaper inside to hold mounds of dry sugar. This is very similar to the mountain camp method, but introduces another box to the hive stack for the bees to navigate. Both options work well and are favored by a good many beekeepers.

Personally, I love the Vivaldi board. I'm not going to write much about the board itself in this post as I'll have another dedicated solely to it but I will way that it's a method of feeding where you place sugar "bricks" into the hive rather than simply pouring bags of sugar into the open hive. It allows you to do a quick check of sugar levels without opening up the hive and also provides hive ventilation during the hot summer months. If you aren't familiar with Vivaldi boards, you may want to take a moment to read up on them.

Sugar bricks are basically dried, formed sugar that the bees can eat. It's not much different from the hardened sugar used in candy boards or mountain camp feeding. The main difference is that you can make it in simple molds that fit the Vivaldi screens perfectly, and also makes it easy to add supplements (such as Honey B Healthy, etc.) ahead of time for use later.

To make the sugar bricks, find a large bowl for mixing and gather up some plastic sandwich containers, dry sugar, some water and a bit of apple cider vinegar. I use Glad-type sandwich containers and bags of sugar from Costco.

First, determine how many sugar bricks you will need. I usually make 15 at a time, which takes 12-14 quarts of sugar. To mix, I use a large stainless steel mixing bowl of sufficient size to hold five or six quarts of dry sugar. Five to six quarts of sugar does not need a large amount of water - surprisingly little, in fact. I take a quart-size container full of water, add in a splash of apple cider and slowly mix water into the sugar a little at a time while stirring vigorously until the mixture is clumpy but not wet. Be careful here, it's better to add too little water than too much water. Slow and easy does it.

Once you are satisfied with the mixture, spoon out and pack into the sandwich containers taking care to press it into the corners and all four sides. Generally, I fill the containers about 3/4 fill as some Vivaldi boards have smaller screens. Smooth out the top with the back of the spoon and keep filling other containers until you run out of sugar mixture or empty containers.

Congratulations! Your bricks are nearly ready. Finally, set the bricks on a high shelf to dry or place them in the refrigerator. Provided you got the mixture right, the sugar will set in 24 to 48 hours, hardening into bricks that can be removed as needed and placed onto the hives in Vivaldi boards. From there, just be sure to check the hives every now and then to see if any sugar bricks need to be replaced. Hungry bees can go through those bricks fairly quickly and you don't want to put yourself in a position where the bees are left without.

Vivaldi boards and sugar bricks are an essential part of my over-wintering strategy that requires little time and effort and pays great dividends by keeping the bee bellies full through late winter and into early spring.