Give your Bees a helping Hand during the cold winter months. By adding this candy board to each hive you will be helping them by providing the hive with an emergency source of food during the winter months. There are many different recipes for the sugar. It is up to you to decide if you want to boil the mixture, or bake the cakes, or simply spread the moistened sugar over newspaper and let it dry. Each board is made using dovetailed joints and 1/4″ galvanized mesh. The board is glued and assembled with 1 1/2″ nails. The sugar also provides an added bonus by absorbing some of the moisture that is generated by the bees in the winter reducing the condensation and humidity inside of the hive. The absorption also softens the sugar cakes making it easier for the bees to eat. CANDY NOT INCLUDED While there are many different recipes on the internet I use the no cook method. 5 pounds of sugar and 7 oz water fit nicely in a 9×13 baking pan. I mix the water and sugar to the consistency of wet sand, then I bake this at 170 degrees for 4 hours and let it cool. This evaporates the water from the sugar producing a “sugar cake”. 2 of these “cakes” fit nicely in the candy board. I also mixed a double batch and placed it directly in the candy board and dried it using parchment paper BELOW the screen to keep the sugar from falling through until dry. This paper is NOT between the screen and sugar. Using this method I left a hole in the center for the bees to crawl through. This hole lines up with the feeder hole in the inner cover so if I wanted to provide sugar syrup during warm periods in the winter or late spring I could by utilizing the interior feeder on the hives I sell without removing the sugar board or disturbing the bees. A pollen patty could be added to the top of the sugar or mixed in the sugar so that the bees accessed it in early spring.