A year ago I moved my bees to what appears to be a nectar-goldmine; it's next to a forest, so there's a large amount of diverse plants and flowers. However, a bush fire did burn a decent amount of it four years ago. I've been told from a local that, it takes about four years for the flowers to grow back and bloom, so maybe more things will bloom this year.
The bees collected a decent amount of honey during the Spring. During the Summer, they seemed to be at a neutral level; they neither lost, or gained honey. I unfortunately didn't get to see how they were performing during Autumn/Fall. I checked up on them recently, as we're leaving Winter with a few weeks until Spring, and they're in a critical shape.
They're all at critically low levels of honey, and they all are quite low on bee population, honey and brood. One of the hives only had dead bees, and a weird white patch on a section of the comb in the hive:
https://imgur.com/a/J2xznghOne other hive seemed like it had no honey, or even brood available. I regrettably didn't look at it in detail to confirm whether there was any eggs, or even a queen; there was a smallish, decent enough size of bees in the hive.
Two more had almost no honey. Another two had maybe half a manley frame of capped honey in total. Another had a little over a manley frame of honey, and the biggest had a little over two manley frames of honey.
I gave the hive that had no brood or honey, and gave them a frame with some brood and another with honey. I moved some frames from the hives that had a little bit of honey, to the ones that had almost nothing, but there wasn't much to go around. I also made up two kilos of sugar water syrup, and I put them into some sandwich bags, placed on top of the hivemat(this sits on top of the frames, which the bees can access) and cut some slits into the sugar syrup.
I'm rather unsure how to proceed. How often will it take the bees to eat that syrup? The soonest I can return is four days, should I go check on the bees ASAP? How much sugar should I feed them? Should I add anything else to the syrup? I see some adding white vinegar. They had some pollen in the hives, but should I try to feed them some sort of protein as well? Should I add any dye to the hives, in case they end up getting a big flow of nectar and store the sugar water, so that I don't accidentally extract and harvest the sugar syrup at a later date? What's up with that white fluffy stuff on the comb in the dead hive?