Thanks to some generous folks in the wake of hurricane Helene our ACBA was donated some HFCS bee food. Thankfully, all of my colonies came thru the storm without issue. Given the huge trees that we lost, judicious use of trunk straps no doubt saved the Apiary.
This fall one of my colonies was running light in hive weight, and I had been feeding 1-1 sugar water while the weather was good in a quart jar Boardman feeder. The hive half-weight was right around 31lbs (It’s a 10 frame deep/medium brood chamber setup) and my thirsty bees were sucking the solution down at the rate of a quart a day, and yet... the hive was not putting on any weight. Given the fall chores that need doing and dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane on top of all of that, running quarts out to that one colony every other day was getting to be a PITA.
A slight explanatory digression is needed here. As you can see in the pic above, we also keep chickens at our place and they produce a goodly number of eggs, more than we can reasonably keep up with just eating, so I’ve been experimenting with water glassing the excess. I have a number of half gallon Ball jars for the task. The thing is they are wide mouth jars. They won’t fit a standard Boardman feeder and with the season changing full steam ahead towards winter hanging jars on the front of the hive will invite robbing. I needed another solution. And to really round out this digression, one of the winter chores that needed doing was mucking out the coop and getting new bedding laid down, bedding made from pine and cedar wood trimmings left over from a friend who makes bee boxes. Anyway...
Amazon to the rescue! An 87mm hole saw from them, some ½” plywood cut to Langstroth hive box outer dimensions, and a spare deep that I normally use during hive inspections for keeping any frames I pull out of the breeze, some elbow grease, some beeswax for the edges of the cut plywood and I can finally bring this run on sentence to a close by saying, problem solved!!
I used my drill press to get the holes cut thru the plywood without outer dimension slop and a clean 90º angle on the corner. Where did I get the lids? I made them. I used an old Boardman lid as a guide, stacked a couple standard Ball lids under it and with a .5mm bit used the trusty drill press to recreate the small mouth quart jar pattern thru the new lids. I did not make additional holes even though I had more space to work with. No need to totally reinvent the wheel, the surface tension of the original Boardman pattern and the vacuum created by leaving some head space in the jar to keep liquids from draining right out when inverted works. Even at half a gallon.
The key takeaways are that you need an 87mm hole saw to properly seat wide mouth Ball jars of whatever capacity you prefer and that a 1/2" thick piece of wood will set the feeding portion of the lid at eactly the right height over the frames below. (I have a plexi inner cover that I set my feeding board over and it works just fine so if you have an inner cover in place it shouldn't be an issue)
A few days later...
Ok four days later, I filled up two new half gallon jars with HFCS and went to go see how my girls are doing... Bee's must be realted to cats. Maybe a quart lower in each of the original jars, so less than half the consumption of the much thicker HFCS feed vs 1-1 sugar water. It will be interesting to see if that holds true. I'll check the hive weight again when I find these jars have been emptied.
In case you are wondering, the little 1/8' thick shim pictured between the jars is intended to act as a hole cover while swapping new jars in. I think I like this set up much better than the old hole in the migratory lid which must act as a heat sink in winter, sucking all the hard work by the winter brood right out of the colony. 2¢.
Kelly Davis
Certified Beekeeper
Member - Anderson County Beekeepers Association
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