> The problem is that many pulled the candy or sugar 
> in the recent warmth and put on syrup. My experience
> is that cold and syrup are incompatible and the bees 
> leave it while they will feed on candy. So syrup
> over the bees should not help.

Candyboards are a wonderful thing, this is indisputable.

While Maine has far colder nights than NYC, syrup over the bees IN THE RIGHT
FEEDER might not be as bad a deal as you think.
The "right feeder" for this application would be the BeeMax polystyrene (aka
"Styrofoam") feeder
(BetterBee product code BHTF)

I love them, as they are a "fire and forget" feeder.  The bees cannot empty
a 5-gallon feeder as quickly as others, and they can get to the feed even in
the rain and damp of a pre-apple-blossom spring.

In this feeder, the thermal mass of a large (4 to 5 gallons) amount of
water, insulated by the polystyrene, is going to result in a temperature
that is more stable despite cold nights.

The thermal mass of water (syrup would be about the same) is excellent: 4186
versus only 2060 for concrete

Expanded polystyrene has an R-Value (its value as insulation) of 4.6 per
inch (compare with wood at 1.41 per inch)

One could also put some "foam-board" insulation over top the feeder, below
the outer cover or migratory cover.

One could model this in MatLab or any of the other 3D finite element
analysis programs, but don't ask me to do it until supers are on and
swarming is over.  :)

Just for fun, one of my favorite units of measure is used for calculating
"Thermal Conductivity", that is, heat loss through walls:
BThU/hour/sq ft/cm/degrees F

What a trainwreck of mixed units!

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html