Large Feeder
When I was using National and Commercial hives, I followed the normal practice of taking honey at the end of the season and having to feed sugar syrup to the bees so that they has sufficient stores to get them through the winter. Sometimes it was necessary to feed them in spring, and if I did a split, the weakened hives would need a feed as well.
This year, after 2 years without any bees I'm using a top bar hive, and I will take some honey during the summer, leave the bees their own honey for winter store and take some more honey next spring. I'm expecting to collect a nucleus in about a month so it's probable that they will need some feeding to help them set up home. If we have a warm spring followed by a wet, cold summer like previous years, they will definitely need a lot of feeding.
With the Nationals and Commercials, feeding was a fairly disruptive undertaking. I had some plastic feeders that sat under the roof and a large contact feeder that needed an eke to cover it. The problem with the plastic feeders was that they only held less than a litre, so they had to be refilled often. The contact feeder was a nightmare to set up. If you did it wrong then a huge amount of sugar syrup would be dumped down the hive.
Every year, I promised myself that I would obtain one of those commercial sized feeders to sit on top of the hive and fill it with litres of solution. I never got round to it!
This year, I started to look at designing a feeder for my top bar hive. It needed to hold a lot of sugar solution so as to keep disruption to a minimum. It would also help if it could be filled from outside the hive and easy to monitor levels.
What I came up with was a version of the Ashforth feeder.
There are three differences between my feeder and an Ashforth. First is size, the feeder is based in a spare brood box. The second change is to have a top bar fixed permanently to the underside of the box with a slot, about 20mm by 100mm cut into it to give bees access to the feeder from the bottom.
The last modification is to fit a raft that floats on top of the syrup to stop bees drowning themselves. The raft is made from plastic drinking straws bonded with Araldite to three blocks of wood. The straws are arranged to be at the bottom, and a piece of dowling gives it strength. I hope it will now provide a platform for the bees to stand on.
The feeder will now fit on top of my hive. I will only have to lift the lid to see if it needs topping up, but the chamber with the bees in it stays dark.
I need to sort out a waterproof joint between the feeder and a flat half roof on the top of the hive, but that is a matter of finding a strip of rubber or similar material to cover the joins and getting some more ply sheet.
As the picture above shows, it can be fitted in any position on the hive. Some heavy plastic sheeting can be pinned to the feeder box to make the hive weather proof and some spare pieces of ply or timber on top of the plastic to hold it down.