Candy board recipe for bees: how much sugar and water
A no-cook candy board is granulated sugar with just enough water to pack, set into a frame and laid over the cluster. Enter how many boards you are making, or how many pounds of sugar you have. The page scales two published mixes to that amount, and they differ on the water: one is about 5% water by weight, the other about 9%.
Two published mixes
The Oregon State University Honey Bee Lab answered a beekeeper's question on Ask Extension in October 2025: mix 10 pounds of sugar with 1 cup (8 oz) of water to a "wet sand" consistency, pack it into boards or trays, let it sit overnight, then place it on the top bars. The lab prefers it because it is easy, needs no cooking and the bees take it readily. It also says published research on the best winter feeding recipes is thin. Treat it as a practical recipe.
The Beekeeper Tips web story is a beekeeping blog. It uses 16 pounds of sugar, three cups of water and a tablespoon of white vinegar, worked in until the sugar is only slightly damp, then pressed into the board and left to set for a night or a day or two. The calculator leaves the vinegar out, since it is a flat spoonful for either batch size.
Both are the same idea at different wetness. Per pound of sugar the blog's mix takes nearly twice the water, so it is the wetter of the two. Which one suits you depends on your air and your board. The extension answer comes from a university lab, and the blog is a beekeeping site. Neither gives a board size, so the pounds per board are yours to enter.
Common amounts
Water for 10 to 50 pounds of sugar, from the same code as the calculator.
| Sugar | Oregon State water | Beekeeper Tips water | 25 lb bags |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 lb | 1.00 cups | 1.88 cups | 0.40 |
| 15 lb | 1.50 cups | 2.81 cups | 0.60 |
| 20 lb | 2.00 cups | 3.75 cups | 0.80 |
| 25 lb | 2.50 cups | 4.69 cups | 1.00 |
| 50 lb | 5.00 cups | 9.38 cups | 2.00 |
When a candy board is used
Honey Bee Suite calls candy boards emergency winter feeding. They are not needed for a normal, healthy hive with plenty of stored honey, and feeding is usually not needed until late winter, February or March depending on where you live. Its test is to lift the back of the hive: if it is very heavy, the colony does not need extra feed.
Start from the weight. The hive weight page and the winter honey stores calculator estimate the honey in the hive, and how much sugar to feed bees for winter turns a gap into pounds of sugar. A candy board is one way to put that sugar in once it is too cold for syrup, which is the cutoff on when to stop feeding bees in fall. Before that, the sugar syrup calculator covers liquid feed.
The pounds of sugar a colony should get is not on this page. These sources give a recipe and no feeding amount per hive, so I left that to your own weight check.
How the numbers are worked out
- Water scales in proportion to sugar from each source's own batch: 1 cup for 10 lb, and 3 cups for 16 lb.
- The share of the mix is water by weight, taking a US cup of water as 236.6 mL at 0.998 g/mL, and a pound as 453.6 g.
- Bags are 25 lb, the same bag size the feeding page uses. Sugar and water amounts are rounded, so a mix measured by the cup will be close to these figures.