(00:06): Hi, my name's Liz Frost and I'm the technical
specialist for Honey Bees with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries. Today,
I'll talk to you about what you should look for if your hives had been affected by drought
or bushfire.
(00:18): If they've survived bushfire, there are a
few key things that you should be looking for in terms of the health and ongoing status
of your hive. When bushfire goes through and your hives have survived, there may be issues
resulting from radiant heat, lack of food source for example. In some instances, re-queening
will be necessary. In other circumstances, the food sources that were surrounding that
apiary site may now be burnt and they may take years to recover. In that case, you most
likely will be moving your remaining beehives to ideally an area with floral resources.
We'll be going through different supplemental feeding regimes and talking about protein
feeding and sugar feeding.
(01:03): We'll talk about sugar feeding first. When
bees are at risk of starvation, we can supplementally feed those bees with sugar syrup or granulated
sugar as their primary supplemental carbohydrate source. What we'll show you now is different
scales of sugar feeding. And what that sugar feeding does is stimulate the hive to produce
royal jelly, it stimulates pollen foraging, importantly, and wax production. So if your
hives are low in population, sugar syrup feeding in autumn will be a must for you.
(01:38): A small scale, a way of feeding sugar syrup
is just with this kind of a bottle feeder in the front entrance. This generic bottle
has sugar syrup in it at a 50% mix of one-to-one water to sugar. The bees can drink that syrup
up through a little output on the bottom and take it into the hive and use it as a ready
to eat food.
(02:03): Another way to feed one-to-one sugar syrup
is through a top feeder. If you have a stronger hive, they may find top feeders accessible
to access that sugar syrup through these different feeding stations in the corner and in the
middle there. This is more for a stronger population of hive. Our next method for feeding
sugar syrup is a frame feeder. This is for a smaller population. If you look in this
hive here, you'll see an in- hive frame feeder that we'd put liquid syrup in and the bees
can access.
(02:38): As our temperatures are getting colder, we'll
want bees to store food versus using it immediately for their needs. We may up the sugar concentration
in that sugar syrup from a one-to-one mix to a two-to-one mix, so two parts sugar to
one part water. Or if you're in colder locations and you haven't had a good chance to get your
hives to store sugar syrup for their immediate needs over winter, you may also, on a smaller
scale, choose to feed granulated sugar. We'll just look at this small hive here, which has
an inner hive mat and a pile of granulated sugar on top, which bees can eat at their
leisure. And this is just dry, granulated sugar. The bees will hydrate that and use
it for their carbohydrate needs.
(03:25): The last thing we'll talk about is bees' protein
needs. Honey bees get protein from pollen from plants, and that's their best source
of protein. If you can't move your apiary site to where there diverse proteins from
pollen sources, the beekeeper may choose to supplementally feed protein. One of those
sources is irradiated bee-collected pollen. This is a bag, a commercially-available bag
of irradiated bee-collected pollen. The importance of irradiation is to neutralise all bacterial
spores, fungal pathogens that could be transmitted by bee-collected pollen.
(04:02): There are also other sources of protein available
to beekeepers that have no honeybee collected pollen in them, so those are an alternate
source of protein. And importantly those should be milled to a fine grain, otherwise bees
will have a difficult time to collect it. Proteins from pollen are very important to
bees because it's their source of crude protein, fats, lipids, fatty acids, minerals and amino
acids that they can't naturally produce themselves.
(04:28): There are sources out there on the web that
are free for beekeepers. For example, our New South Wales DPI prime facts, one by Dr.
Doug Somerville on supplementary feeding is a really good one. As well as an Agrafutures
publication called "Fat Bee, Skinny Bees," also by Doug Somerville. Our Ag Guide, Healthy
Bees, so new South Wales DPI has the Ad Guide series, which tells beekeepers from all scales
how to look for health in their hives, how to supplemental feed and various other management
topics.