Chemistry: The Secret to Crystal-Free 2:1 Bee Tea Sugar Syrup

Above is my crystallizing bee tea sugar syrup from the weekend. As in an earlier post, I read up on the chemistry of sugar saturation and changed my formula.

The bee tea below was made with the new formula:

• 2 cups chamomile tea, steeped for 20 minutes
• 8 cups of water
• leaves from three or four sprigs of thyme
• several shakes of coarse sea salt
• 1/2 tsp of lemon juice
• 20 cups of sugar

Bring the water to a rolling boil while the tea is steeping. Add the tea, thyme, salt and lemon juice to the boiling water. Turn off the heat and stir in 20 cups of sugar. I stir in 4 cups at a time and stir until that fully dissolves before adding the next 4 cups.



The jars below have been sitting for three days in my cool-at-night kitchen and have not crystallized. I've moved the jars, shaken them up (one way that crystals sometimes begin to form) and no crystals have formed.

The addition of the lemon juice which should serve to break the sucrose into glucose and fructose (and thus stop crystals from forming) had two effects.  The syrup has not formed crystals.  The thyme leaves instead of floating suspended in the syrup have all sunk to the bottom.  You can see them in the photo below, lying on the bottom of the jars.

The addition of simply 1/2 tsp of lemon juice to this much syrup was enough to accomplish my goal.  Whoo Hoo!

Quick Rabun Report

It snowed in Rabun County this weekend and was cold, cold, cold the whole time we were there. I didn't want to disturb the bees but am worried about this hive since I don't think they are ready for winter.

The prediction for this coming week is that the highs will be in the 60s and 70s after noon each day of this coming week.

I do want to give these bees more food, so I stopped by on my drive back to Atlanta and switched out the empty baggies for two full ones. I don't know if it will help them, but I'd like to think so.

Given the temperature (around 42 when we stopped) I only pulled off the top, yanked out the baggies and installed two more rather quickly. There were a few dead bodies on the landing as one would expect in weather too cold to fly.

Revisiting Bee Tea

It's been over a week since I have fed either Blue Heron or Valerie's hives - I decided to take care of that today so I went with Julia to Blue Heron before I went to work and to Topsy at a break after lunch.  Here is the process of making the bee tea and the feeding of the hives.

I put a slideshow up because I am now including both chamomile and thyme from my garden in the bee tea.  Interestingly, the hive at Blue Heron had only used half of the baggie syrup and almost none of the pint jar in the Boardman on the interior.

I wonder if they have run out of storage room?  Or if the aster blooming in the fields is meeting their current needs?  Or if I hadn't cut long enough slits in the baggie or had clogged holes in the jar lid of the Boardman?  I cut longer slits in the baggie and changed out the pint jar for a jar with a better lid.

We'll see this weekend when Julia and I revisit these hives to do a final consolidation for winter.

Bits of Bee News from Rabun County

I arrived in Rabun County on Thursday and stopped by the Community Garden to check on the bees. They had, of course, gone through the syrup I left for them when I was there the first weekend in October. I put two bags of bee tea on the hive and left, expecting these bees to go through the syrup as quickly as my bees at Blue Heron or at Valerie's house do.



I also changed out the top "migratory" cover (I put it in quotes because it really was a solid bottom board acting as a top cover) for an inner cover and a telescoping cover anchored with the usual brick.

Meanwhile Rabun County had its first frosty night that night resulting in beautiful trees....but slowing down the previously copious fall nectar flow.



I expected to replenish the food at the hive on Saturday morning and then again before I left either Sunday evening or Monday morning.

I stopped by the hive on Saturday morning to find three dead bees on the landing board.  At first I was afraid of robbing, but realized that these were three full bee bodies - usually when robbing has happened the bodies are ripped in half or you see bee body parts.  These were girls who died but it was too cold to carry out the bodies.  So they left them on the landing until the temperatures rose later in the day.



They had only begun to use the bee tea.  One baggie was more diminished than the other, but they were not ready for a new baggie.

So now my plan changed to stop by the hive as I left town to return to Atlanta and change out the baggie rather than have an opportunity to feed them three times in five days!

On the way back to my house on that cold Saturday morning, I stopped by Osage Market - a farmer's market on 441 that is overflowing with fall vegetables.  Sadly this is my last visit for the year as the market closes for the season on October 31.  Bob Binnie, a well-known Georgia beekeeper, maintains an observation hive there.  

Given the freezing weather of the night before, the bees in the observation hive were clustering and I took their picture.  Their cluster is actually a figure eight because of the flatness of the one-dimensional hive.   Seeing them really made me wish to have an observation hive - maybe next year.

The weather stayed cold while we were there - after all, it is fall.  So when I returned to the hive on Sunday afternoon as I drove back to Atlanta, the bees still had not emptied the two baggies I had left.

If these same baggies were on an Atlanta hive, the food would have been moved to comb practically overnight.  But it has been too cold in Rabun and doesn't warm up enough for bee action until the middle of the day.

This may be my last chance to feed these bees because I won't be back until the first weekend in November. So I took the most diminished baggie off of the hive and replaced it with a very full bee tea bag (about 2 1/2 quarts).  Here's the baggie I took off - the bees are still feeding at the slits even as the baggie is on the inner cover.

The full baggie and the remaining amount in the other baggie will at least help them since the afternoons are in the 70s so they can move the syrup around.

I think this hive remains too light for winter survival.  I'm going to try to address this issue when I return at the beginning of November - maybe by putting an inverted jar or jars above the cluster on end bars to allow feeding during cold but not freezing days.  Jennifer Berry talked about doing this at our most recent bee meeting.

To do this I'll need to put a medium or deep empty super to surround the feeding jars.  I wonder if for insulation purposes it would be a good idea to fill the empty space around the bottles with crumpled newspaper or if that would drive the bees crazy.  I'll put a post on Beemaster and see what response I get.

Bee Tea for Blue Heron

On Thursday I checked on the Blue Heron hive. They had emptied the Boardman (interior) and had emptied the baggie feeder. It is increasingly cooler at night. As winter approaches I may start feeding with an upturned jar but instead of the Boardman, simply balance it on two end bars.

Jennifer Berry talked about this at our bee meeting on Wednesday. She feeds her hives through the winter. Most of her hives have a larger (jar accommodating) circle cut out of the inner cover and she has a cut in the top cover on which she can upturn a jar. So she can feed the hive without opening it. However, an alternative she suggested would be to use a box as a surround for a jar feeder sitting on end bars just above the cluster so that the bees can access it easily. To access a Boardman, they have to leave the cluster and walk into the feeder, a challenge when you are a cold bee.



I brought bee tea to this hive both for the baggie and in a jar. I lower the bag gently and slowly to allow the bees to get out of the way into the cracks between the bars.

Still going very slowly down (I even had time to take a couple of pictures, as you see!)


Once down I left this hive for the weekend, fed with the interior 1 pint boardman and a baggie with about 2 1/2 quarts in it. Julia's second hive at Blue Heron is not doing well - small hive beetles everywhere - so we are concerned about all the Blue Heron hives and their ability to get through the winter.

Ross Conrad's Bee Tea

 August's Bee Culture has an article by Ross Conrad (he writes an article every month) on beekeeping in the northeast.  As it is autumn, he talks about preparing the hive for the winter.  Included as a sidebar for the article is his recipe for Bee Tea.  I decided to try it for feeding the bees at Blue Heron.

Here's the recipe:
16 cups white cane sugar
6 cups hot tap water
2 cups Chamomile or Thyme tea (already brewed)
1/2 tsp natural sea salt with minerals

You add the hot tap water to the sugar and salt and stir thoroughly (?).  You do boil the water for the tea and steep it for 10-15 minutes.  Then you mix it all together and store unused amounts in the refrigerator.

I have a hard time making 2:1 syrup without using really hot water.  Maybe the water out of the tap in Vermont where Ross lives is hotter than here in Atlanta! (note:  comment below indicates it's probably the chemistry of the water in Vermont compared to my Metro Atl water).

So  I heated my water and then stirred in the sugar and salt.  Even at that, I couldn't add the last four cups because the first 12 had not thoroughly dissolved.

My answer was to stir the last four cups into the hot tea after it had steeped.

The next time I make it, I will steep the tea and then stir the steeped tea into the water heating on the stove.  Then before the water boils, I'll turn it off and then stir in the sugar and salt.

Making the tea:

 Stirring all of it together:

Adding the syrup to my Blue Heron hive (notice it is more yellow than the usual clear syrup, courtesy of the Chamomile) :

You may wonder why I have both a baggie and a Boardman inside this hive.  It's an 8 frame hive and can't take two baggies, so I put a Boardman in so that I could put more feed on the hive at the same time, since there's room for the Boardman inside the medium box that is surrounding the feeding mechanisms.

Another post about Ross Conrad