Autumn Feeding: Building Winter Stores Before the Cold Sets In

Once temperatures drop and the last useful UK forage (commonly ivy, where it's locally abundant) tails off, bees lose the ability to process and evaporate down liquid syrup efficiently, and eventually stop taking it up at all. This makes autumn feeding time-critical in a way spring feeding is not: syrup fed too late may sit unripened and increase the risk of fermentation or dysentery over winter rather than being converted into stable, capped stores. As a rule of thumb, most UK beekeepers aim to have feeding substantially finished by the point night-time temperatures are regularly dropping toward single figures Celsius, adjusting for their own region and the autumn they're actually having.

Autumn feeding typically uses a heavy syrup, made with a higher proportion of sugar to water (commonly around 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight) than the light syrup used for spring stimulation. The higher concentration mimics ripe honey more closely and requires less evaporation effort from the colony to cap it, which matters as the weather cools and evaporation becomes harder. Feeding is usually done in a small number of large doses via a fast-acting feeder (see the linked feeder-types article) rather than little and often, precisely because the aim is bulk storage rather than ongoing stimulation of brood rearing.

UK guidance commonly targets somewhere in the region of 18-20kg of stores (honey plus any converted syrup) per colony to see it through a typical winter, though this varies with hive type, colony size and local winter severity, and beekeepers in colder or more exposed regions often aim higher. Weighing (or 'hefting') the hive gives a rough practical check without needing to open it up in cooling weather.

Starting too early wastes the chance to use any late natural forage still coming in and can crowd the brood nest before the colony has finished rearing its final rounds of winter bees. Starting too late risks unripened stores and can trigger robbing, since exposed syrup at a time when forage is scarce draws in bees from neighbouring colonies looking for an easy source. Feeding in the evening or using entrance restrictors reduces this robbing risk. A final stores assessment, ideally combined with a look at colony strength and a check for disease, is the standard close to the autumn feeding period before winter proper begins.