Frosty and Bees

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you.

This week's Rain's Art and Dinner Date challenge is Frosty, Here's a collage I made using some leaves from the yard as well as some die cut snowflakes. 

I am linking up to Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's challenge at Art Journal Journey. For November their challenge Food and Drink or Art Fodder or Both.

We had our first hard frost the other morning, and I did manage to get a few frosty photos. 

For my dinner date  this week, I have something different. Last week I needed to do much of my honeybee hive winterizing. It was time since some very frosty nights were predicted. This year we've managed to escape the hard frosts until late October, which is unusual for New Hampshire.

One of the first winter tasks with the bees is to make them some fondant food.

Fondant is a food supplement put into the hive so that when the bees run out of honey, they can have some food to stay alive. They say bees in the Northeast need 80-90 pounds of honey in the hive to survive the winter. My hive has honey in it, but I know it doesn't have 80-90 pounds of it because if it did, I wouldn't be able to lift the boxes, which  I can still do. 

I think my bees just like the fondant though. Since October was fairly mild, my bees were still out buzzing around looking for pollen. Yet when I put in a 5 pound patty of fondant early in  the month, it was gone in less than a week. And that happened twice more.

This time I made 20 pounds of fondant and put 15 pounds into the hive. Unless it gets really cold (which means I shouldn't open the hive because it lets out all the heat generated by the bees inside), I will make another 10 pounds and add another 15 pounds to the hive in another week or so.

I needed my biggest stock pot to make my fondant.

Last year I didn't have a candy thermometer and my fondant came out very crumbly. This year I bought one, and it really helped. I knew when to pull the boiling sugar off of the heat.

And here's the final product cooling. Each pan holds 5 pounds of fondant.

Bees keep the inside of the hive heated to around 95 degrees. In warmer climes the bees don't need a lot of winterizing, but here in New Hampshire we can have long and cold winters. If the hive loses too much heat, the bees have to work extra hard to keep the hive at 95 degrees. It can be too much work for the bees and they can die from the cold. ( I think that is what happened to my bees last winter, even though I winterize them. This year I am going to do some extra winterizing, just in case we have another long and extra cold winter like we did last year.)

And here's my hive. 

I slipped on a bee blanket (the black wrap) to help hold in the heat. Around the bottom hive stand, I bagged some raked leaves and am using those as insulation around the base. I could use a few more bags of leaves, which I will add once I finish my raking.

The yellow you see below the top is an insulated box. It helps to keep the heat the bees create from going out of the top. 

My husband (the engineer) has been coming up with a windbreak solution. We still haven't put it up, but that is on the list to complete in the very near future. 

If the weather goes as it normally does, I'll have one more visit into the hive and then, they sit for the winter .

OK, that's it for me today. Thanks for getting this far, and I hope your week ends well.