I was given a hive top feeder recently, and I hardly ever feed syrup, so I was standing in the garage looking at it thinking, "What am I going to do with this?", and suddenly an idea came to me. I bent up the hardware cloth to allow the bees access to the feed chamber, and then I filled it up with some old comb that was full of uncapped nectar. I put it on top of a hive that was a little light on stores, and they picked it all clean in a few days. I wanted to cycle out this really dark comb, and I wanted to let the bees clean out what they could from it, but I've been trying to get away from open feeding, since I think it makes mites really spread around the yard in the fall. Yesterday I filled the feeder up with like a gallon of wet wax from crushing and straining, something else I would have just set out in the past. I'm hoping this will help with mite management in the fall, and I'm totally psyched about it.
