With the colder weather and a lower population in the main yard, we decided that we were going to close up the extra space in the hives in order to help to conserve heat during the upcoming winter.

One way to do this is to bring the colonies together into shared space, with common walls. In this way the heat generated by the two colonies work in concert to keep both colonies warm.

Each colony gets its own entrance, which oppose each other in order to minimize drifting between the members of the two colonies.

The other thing we did, and this may be early, but we will see, is to install Mountain Camp feeders on the top (see last weeks post) to help them get through the winter with less than ideal stores.

This last week have been really wet and cold and the colonies in the yard at the house have been pretty much sticking to the hives. Since their stores are not the level I would like, we're going to be installing Mountain Camp feeders on both of the colonies.

This is actually a simple project in that what really needs to happen is to provide a little bit of extra space above the top bars and then load that space with dry cane sugar.

The purpose of this is to give them emergency stores so they have something to sustain them through the winter.

We have a couple of different configurations up there right now so I wanted to get rims for all of these sizes put together. I have recently converted most of my equipment to medium from deeps so the piece I cut off of that equipment is serving well to make these rims.

Rims for either Mountain Camp feeders or candy boards

I decided to make rims that could be used for either Mountain Camp feeding, which is just granulated dry came sugar, or to be able to make candy boards which would have a solid block of sugar that is molded into the rim. I figured this would give me more flexibility as time went on.

View from the front and top (notice the small entrance/ventilation hole)

The rims are roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches tall. They have half inch hardware cloth stapled to the bottom which will support a paper underlay beneath the sugar.

These rims, when they have sugar in them, are great for winter in damp climates because the sugar absorb excess moisture within the hive. If you look closely you'll notice they have a three eights inch hole drilled in the top portion of it which serves as an entrance as well as a way for extra moisture to escape.

The bottom of the rim, which has 1/2" hardware cloth across it.

We will be placing these on the hives when we come to a decision as to what the overwintering hive configuration would look like.

Consolidation of the colonies for winter

Preparing for Winter