Welcome To The Bee Corner!
Hello Huneebee friends!
It’s Tim here, with what will be a (hopefully!) monthly update about the goings on in our apiaries and gardens. I’ll try to offer some insight into my beekeeping and gardening practices, sharing info and tips from my years of experience. The nice thing about both beekeeping and gardening is that you never stop learning; there’s always more to discover and understand. I also love the experimentation that’s essential to developing one's craft.
To that end, if you pass by our Arthur, James, or Clifton St. gardens, you may see one hive among the others that looks rather different. Is it a hive or an air conditioner? Maybe a refrigerator? It’s actually a hive all dressed up in its winter insulation for an experiment I’m conducting. For a number of years now, in my own hives, I’ve been following local beekeeper (and friend of HBP) Bill Hesbach’s winterizing advice laid out here. As I shift into my role as beekeeper for the Huneebee Project, I'm curious to see how my personal insulation practices compare to those HBP has been using the past few years. Will these super-insulated hives have better survival? Will they consume less honey, and therefore be less likely to need emergency feeding?
In his article, Bill argues for trying to mimic the conditions of bees nesting in a tree cavity, and against excessively ventilating hives (a fairly standard beekeeping practice). As bee colonies have survived for millennia in trees without our intervention, it makes good sense to try to replicate those conditions, namely a space that is both highly insulated and relatively draft-free.
Ideally, under these conditions, a few things happen. As you may know, during winter, honeybees cluster together and shiver to produce heat. In a well-insulated hive, the heat generated by the cluster will dissipate from the hive more slowly. Less ventilation means there will be less airflow across the cluster, which also helps retain heat. As the bees in the cluster respire, they, like us, exhale both carbon dioxide and water vapor. With reduced ventilation, the CO2 builds up inside the colony. While too much CO2 is harmful for us (not to mention our planet), inside the hive it causes the metabolic rate of the bees to slow significantly. This helps them conserve energy and therefore consume less of their stored honey.
The water vapor the bees exhale rises in the warm air coming off of the cluster, eventually reaching the top of the hive. This moist air will condense into water droplets when it reaches a cold surface. If the top of the hive in particular is not well insulated, these droplets can fall back onto the cluster of bees, killing them.
In a tree, the thickest and therefore most insulated parts surrounding the colony are above and below the cluster. The sidewalls of the tree cavity will be thinner and therefore cooler, meaning water will condense on the walls and run harmlessly down the sides of the hive. It’s even possible that some of this water can be reclaimed by the bees to drink or use to soften and dilute stored honey.
Recreating the conditions of a tree cavity requires a lot of insulation. Following (mostly!) the method described in the article, I’ve surrounded these particular hives with a sleeve of insulation (as you can see in the picture to the right). I put an additional sheet of insulation cut to the dimensions of the inner cover between the inner and outer covers (this insulation sheet is something we add to every HBP hive in the winter). I adjust the sleeve so it sits flush with the bottom lip of the outer cover (this is where my design differs slightly from Bill’s, which also might make it slightly less efficient). To help keep the top extra insulated, I then attach a “scarf” around the perimeter of the outer cover, which covers the tiny gap between the outer cover and insulation sleeve, and helps to hold the sleeve up.
I’m always looking for ways to creatively re-use materials. I scour building sites for scraps of insulation to rescue for insulation and make the “scarves” by deconstructing the insulated bags used to ship food in those subscription meal-kit boxes. All these materials, destined for a landfill, are interrupted on their journey to help keep our bees alive in the winter. Last month, Alejandra and I spent a few hours cutting, folding and taping to transform a large donation of insulated bags into hive scarves.
It’s a bit unwieldy, the sleeves are difficult to store, and the covers with scarves can be annoying to open, but I’ve been surrounding my hives this way for years and feel like my survival rates have improved since adopting the method. I’ve also noticed that my well-insulated hives are less likely to need emergency food in the late winter/early spring. This year affords me the perfect opportunity to test whether or not this method is worth all of the trouble. Most of my personal hives are thus insulated, and by wrapping a few HBP test hives in our apiaries, I can compare survival rates, amounts of stores, and colony sizes in the spring.
While not taking place under laboratory conditions, and while there are other variables to consider (most notably the different strengths and sizes of each colony and their honey stores going into winter), I’m hoping this experiment will help me decide if taking the extra effort to dress my hives up for the winter is worth it. Check this space in April for a discussion of the results!