THE APIARY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3882, 7 August 1928, Page 11

THE APIARY.

By

J. A.

FEEDING. Seasons of experience alter our ideas and methods. Even in the feeding of bees this seems to hold good. In old box hive days, when little was known of the internal needs and arrangements of the hives, a feeder might be any vessel that would contain about one or two tablespoonfuls of syrup. It would not provide a lick all round for the inmates, but then we did not know any better. Gradually the amount has been increased—rather grudgingly perhaps, for it has been like drawing blood out of a stone to make beekeepers put syrup into a hive. Extracting time is all right. All the tins needed can be ordered, and the extractor kept going; but to buy bags of sugar and to feed tne syrup by the pailful, that is a different story. Even old beekeepers (and I include myself in this reference) are slow to realise the full development that may come from a well-studied system of feeding which will treat the colony of bees as a factory in miniature to be developed during August, September, October, and November, and even on to December 15 for a honey season to come between December 15 and February 15. It may last only two weeks or it may dribble on most of the two months, but all experience shows that it will not go outside of those dates.

Readers may ask: “Are you going to feed bags of sugar in pailfuls of syrup during that long spring period for the chance of a flow that may last only two weeks?” My reply is that one of the shortest flows in my experience lasted just 14 days. My scale hive, which was a fair index of the apiary, put on in that time 1201 b, the apiary giving a remarkably good crop for so short a season. Had the treatment that preceded it been on a more lavish scale much more might have been done; but I have to confess that at that time and for many years afterwards I was not fully alive to the possibilities of a careful and steady working up of the population in the spring. When my apiary was situated in the neighbourhood of native bush, Nature herself partly made up for my deficiencies by the bush nectar she supplied.

There are, however, sometimes weather conditions which make the bush nectar impossible for the bees, and in which the beekeeper, if his colonies are going to reach *he peak of condition, must see not only that they have something to live on, but that they are impressed with the abundance of supplies and are stretching out their brood nest with every confidence.

Some may laugh at the idea of bees having any such thing as confidence, but there is no beekeeper worth his salt but has observed how quickly the bees hedge on supplies if they are running short, and how soon they will not only stop brood-rearing, but begin to empty the brood cells that are under way, even tearing out fully developed brood. That is working in the wrong direction. What we want, and can supply if we wish, is the confidence that will feed the queen well and also the brood, and keep the brood nest always full and always increasing in size—not a rush and then a stop, but a steady forward movement. I can remember one occasion in which I tried this latter style. I had a colony by which I particularly wished to de well. If I remember rightly, it had a carniolan queen, and came out of the winter almost starving. I fed it well, and had the pleasure of seeing it build up a fine brood nest; but for some reason I neglected it for a time, and when 1 went back it was gone. ■ There were five sheets of brood scaled up, but not a drop of honey. That colony had put confidence in the beekeeper, and he had failed it, and that is what would happen to a whole apiary if it was treated in the same way. The bogey of supplying the necessary quantity of sugar is one that every beekeeper must face for himself in accordance with his means. It may. however, be taken as an axiom that the more thorough and systematic the feeding the safer will be the investment. Even if we allow for two tons of sugar for an apiary of 100 colonies, one ton of honey will pay for it, and it is inconceivable that, if properly fed, it will not increase the crop far more than that. Let us look at it from another angle. The gathering power of a colony when the flow is on is in accordance with the number of bees it .contains. One colony may have 51b of bees, another 151 b. Under those conditions it is a fair inference that the 151 b colony will gather three times as much as the other. A colony in the Oakleigh apiary which was crowded in three storeys once put on 1001 b in four days and 3421 b for the season. I have mentioned this before, but use it as a good illustration of what strong colonies may accomplish. That is the kind of thing we want in every apiary. (To be continued.)