It’s that time of year to give the bees a quick heft to check that they have enough food to last them through until the spring flowers arrive. Although I heft the hives each year I am still never confident that there is enough food inside, even for those that feel they have a reasonable weight. So I decide to do what I usually do and that is feed each hive with some fondant, with the rationale that if they don’t need it they won’t eat it, and that is better than them starving. This year I have elected to make the fondant rather than simply buy it which is what I usually do.
The recipe
The first task is finding a recipe, which with Google is easy enough. Then there is the choice of which recipe, to add white wine vinegar or not. It is true what they say, if you have 3 beekeepers in a room you will get 4 different opinions. I opt for a recipe from a beekeeping association, which I figure should be reliable and it did include vinegar.
In this case 800 grammes of caster sugar, 200ml of water and a teaspoon of white wine vinegar
Making the syrup
The next step was to bring the water, sugar and white wine vinegar to the boil, stirring continuously and then add a lid and bring the temperature to 234˚F, that’s 112°C to those of you who only use metric. GymCee did query why the recipe on a modern webpage was only in imperial, but I didn’t worry about it too much as my thermometer (bought for making chocolate which I will discuss in another blog) shows both!
Once the mixture reach xxx I needed to turn off the heat and bring the temperature down to xxx. That took a lot longer than I had originally anticipated. When the right temperature was reached I needed to mix it until it went a white colour.
Whisking the fondant
First I put the mixture into a xxx and turned it on. After 10 minutes or more it didn’t look like anything was happening and we decided that maybe using a mixer with blades rather wasn’t whipping it up properly. We then transferred it to the Andrew James stand mixer (which is very similar to a xxx but much cheaper at a quarter of the price and it works really well for the baking that I do. Once that got going with the attachment for whipping egg whites you could tell it was a much better option. The mixture was getting filled with air bubbles and after a while started turning white.
I didn’t have any spare take away tubs so decided to put some tinfoil in breakfast bowls and pour the mixture into that. This would also enable me to easily remove the fondant out of the bowls when putting them into the hive. Once the mixture was in the bowls you could see that it was the right colour and now we just needed to wait for it to set. I felt really chuffed that it had worked.
Feeding the bees
A couple of days later I suited up and took the fondant out to the hives. As I needed to lift the lid to put the fondant on top of the crown board it also gave me the opportunity to see if there were any bees in the hive. I can happily say that I saw bees in 3 of the hives and with the 4th hive there was a super on top so that made it difficult to see and I didn’t want to open the hive, but did see a few bees coming out of the entrance, so I am hopeful that they may all have survived the winter so far!
