One of the first times I fed my bees, I got stung over a hundred times.
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I want to be clear that this was entirely my fault. I showed up without my full suit because I thought, in the way that humans think before they know better, that bringing food to hungry creatures would make them happy to see me.
It did not make them happy to see me.
They went up my pant legs. My ankles swelled to the size of my knees. My legs looked like tree trunks for days. What I learned at my next bee club meeting, after describing what happened with what I imagine was a very specific kind of humility, is that a hungry hive is an aggressive hive. When stores are low and there's nothing coming in from foraging, bees interpret anything cracking open their hive as a robber trying to take what little they have left. (think a bear and a beehive)
I was not a generous benefactor bringing groceries. I was a threat.
My two worst experiences in beekeeping have both involved feeding. So I brought it to my bee club. This is one of the reasons I can't say enough about finding a bee club, whether that's in person or online. At my club, every meeting has a time set aside for questions and problems, and when I shared what was happening and told them I was not interested in repeating the experience, the club president asked if I'd tried an external feeding station placed well away from the hives. He was clear that distance was the key, at least fifty feet to avoid drawing hungry bees toward the hive entrance, which can trigger robbing from other hives fast. I'll also say that in a room full of beekeepers you will get a different answer from every single person, and some of them said they would never use an external feeding station. That's the nature of beekeeping. But I wanted to try it, so I took what he offered and figured out what worked for my setup.
I tried the easiest thing first. An open bowl of sugar syrup with wine corks floating on top so the bees could land without drowning. It worked, in the sense that bees found it immediately. By afternoon the bowl was covered in bees. The problem was that sugar syrup sitting open in a Texas yard attracts more than bees, and I came back a couple of days later to find the bowl knocked over. I reset it. Same thing happened again, and this time I noticed the corks had teeth marks in them. Something else had found the buffet. I wasn't mad about it, wildlife has to eat too, but I needed something more contained.
That's when I thought about the inboard feeders I already had for inside the hive. If they worked in there, they'd work out here too, just in a structure that kept things contained and gave the bees easy access without turning it into an open invitation for everything else in the yard.
I had a broken-down picnic table already sitting on the property that wasn't getting used for much else. Waste not want not. I moved it out to a spot about a hundred feet from the hives, set up a bottom board on the table, stacked a couple of medium boxes on top, dropped two inboard feeders inside, and put a telescoping lid over the whole thing. No inner cover, so the bees have easy access from the top. I only fill two of my four feeders at a time, which gives me two empty ones ready to swap in without any downtime.
I call it the Bee Buffet. My husband knows exactly what I mean when I say I'm going to go check the Bee Buffeted.
The timing change alone made this worth building. Because it's away from the hive I can go out in the evening after the bees have returned home for the night, swap the empty feeders for full ones, and be back inside in under five minutes. No suit. No smoker. No cracking open a hive while they're already on edge. I make the syrup, let it cool, fill the feeders, and go out there when it suits me.
It also works as a gauge. If I'm putting out two full feeders and they're draining them in less than three days, I know they need it. If a batch is sitting for five or six days without much movement, I know they're finding enough on their own and I can ease off. That kind of read on the hive used to require suiting up and going in. Now it just requires a quick walk out back.
I've been doing this about a month and I'm really happy with how it's going. I can't tell you yet how it holds up through every season because I haven't gotten there, but what I can tell you is that for as long as the weather stays warm enough that the bees are foraging and willing to leave the hive, this setup should keep working. The Bee Buffet runs on liquid syrup, which means it's tied to temperatures. Once it consistently drops into the low fifties the bees will cluster inside and stop coming out, and at that point the station out back stops being useful. Winter feeding is a different method and a different conversation, but for the warmer months I'm not looking for a reason to change what's working.
The full setup is on a free downloadable field card if you want the specifics in one place. Get the Bee Buffet Field Card for Free
From The Field: If something is discouraging, let that be the reason to find a different way, not the reason to quit