FFeeding supplemental foods to your honey bees when natural food sources like pollen, nectar, or honey are scarce will provide the necessary nutrition for your colonies to survive winter. These are our recommendations for you:
When should you start feeding your hives for winter? If you live in a region that does not have a heavy dependable Fall nectar flow, begin feeding 6 weeks before cold weather arrives.
How much do you feed bees in the winter? A colony will need the equivalent of about 18kg of honey or sugar syrup to survive the winter. Any late honey stored in September is a bonus.
What should you feed your bees in winter? If the temperatures in your area are going to be below 50°F (10°C), it is best to use fondant, sugar cakes, or granulated sugar rather than syrup.
If you don’t have extra honey from your own apiary to feed the bees, the next best thing is sugar syrup made from white table sugar. The syrup used in fall and winter should be roughly in the proportion of two parts sugar to one part water by either weight or volume. It is important to use a sugar syrup calculator to determine precisely the amount of water and sugar for making sugar syrup.
If your temperatures are warm (above 50°F) you can use liquid feed and one of the internal feeders so your bees don’t have to go outside to eat. Also, you may want to add a mold inhibitor.
Discover our 2 types of calculators. They are handy and you can start using them right away to get a specific volume of syrup from sugar and water.