Last night, I gave the bees the reserve syrup I had made. Today was nice and warm all day and when I got home, the jar was completely empty. I'm going to make up a couple of batches tonight, but my wife isn't going to be willing to refill the one feeder jar we have, so it will still have to wait until I get back unless I start putting it in a different container. I'm not going to make a 5-gallon bucket worth, but I do have a spare pot the dogs have been drinking out of that I might could use. I'll have to see. The main problem will be making a floater for it to keep them from drowning. I made one out of a scrap piece of plywood I had laying around for a water pail I set beside the hive. Sticks and such weren't working, and we'd see 1 or 2 drowned bees a day. None since I put in the floater. I just used the bandsaw to cut it round almost the same size as the pail, and then drilled holes all over it.
Anyway, I reflilled the jar today with another 350 grams of sugar and water. Interestingly, I measured what I poured into the jar after it cooled, and it was something like 682 grams. It seems like a lot to me that nearly 20 grams of water would have evaporated, even considering that some of the syrup was still clinging to the inside of the pot after I poured it. But, maybe not. Regardless, it probably means I need to keep track of just sugar weight instead of syrup weight in the log. The purpose is to determine 1) how much I need to make over a given amount of time, and 2) how much it costs me. The difference in sugar is greater than that for water, so I'm better off ignoring the water that evaporates than using an incorrect total weight. Of course, at least with the total weight, I would end up overshooting instead of undershooting, but I'll worry about that later if I have to.
I've also decided to keep a single blog post as a constantly updating bee log. That post is here: Beehive Log.
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