Candy - with a side order of plastic!

Due to the ever-changing weather, this Spring we are faced with some interesting challenges. The odd warm sunny day means that the bees kick into production overdrive and instruct the queens to start laying eggs. New babies mean lots of new mouths to feed, so the foragers take every opportunity to fly out and find pollen from crocuses, daffodils, heathers, mahonia etc. Unfortunately there have been more cold wet days than sunny warm ones which means the bees can't go out food-gathering and there is a danger of the new brood starving.

So we ordered some special feed called 'candipollen', a mix of sugar candy and pollen, which arrived in 1kg plastic bags (a kilo of candy in a plastic bag, not ridiculously heavy plastic bags...). We slit a small opening in each bag and then placed one per hive over the feeder hole in the crownboard. Normally it will take around a fortnight for this amount of feed to disappear...but there are a lot more bees in the hives now and they are hungry! During the weekly check I was greeted with the sight of a very empty bag when I lifted the roof off one of the hives - the picture above shows that, not only did the bees eat all the candy, but that they'd started to chew the sugar-coated plastic bag too! Don't worry, they won't have eaten it - it's more a case of them tearing off bits to lick clean and then chucking out the plastic shreds. While the weather continues in this vein we are still feeding them, and crossing our fingers that we can stop before our bees develop Type II diabetes...!