I think I’ve finally developed my first useful item that could officially be called a “gadget”. The beekeeping world is fond of using this word.
The item is used to determine if a colony is still alive in the cold of winter, something not always easily checked without disturbing the bees. Some people use the “knock” test in which you put your ear against the hive and give it a good thump and listen for a “hum” in response to the disturbance you just induced, but I don’t like the disturbance in the first place.
My method and gadget use the downturned notch in the inner cover, or wherever the beekeeper has decided to vent the moisture-ladened air produced by a cluster. I bought a cheap digital thermometer, and when I say cheap I mean straight from China via airmail cheap. The thermometer has an LCD display with a probe attached at the end of a long length of wire. I simply taped the last two feet or so of this wire to a very stiff yet still bendable piece of metal wire while leaving the probe hang off the end. Here are some pictures. Click them for a larger version.
To use this little novelty, leave it outdoors on a cold day, or early morning would be even better, so the thermometer reads the outdoor temperature. Then take this to your hive and put the probe into the notch in the inner cover (or whatever is venting your warm air) an inch or two deep. Watch the temperature for a climb. My thermometer will climb about 1/2 degree every second as it updates, and once it’s climbed a few degrees you can be assured there’s something in that box making the warmth…your bees!
There are a few limitations of this device. It’s only really reliable in a cold environment on a cold day, but if it isn’t cold your bees are probably flying if they are alive. Also, even if used on a cold day, if your hives are wrapped in black and the day is very sunny, enough solar gain in the box may exist to give you a rise in temperature even if the bees aren’t alive. That’s why I recommend evening or better yet, check them on a cold morning when all that gain from the previous day would be gone. If the temperature jumps degree after degree at that time of day, your bees are still kicking.
Something that has me thinking over the past few days is the “sustainable apiary” and what that means exactly. The venerable Mike Palmer is the one who I think has coined this term. The definition isn’t what’s really giving me a hard time, it’s exactly what a backyard beekeeper has to maintain in order to achieve this when considering the recent survival rates. We like to think that if we just develop a more local, hardy, survivable queen and have her mate with local, hardy, survivable drones then any hive will survive the winter. Of course some bees have more winter hardiness than others, but I don’t think it’s the case where if we simply have local bees then we’ll have such a high degree of success that any apiary can be self-sustaining. I think it’s more of a numbers game no matter the lineage or race of the bee.
Can a backyard beekeeper have a sustainable apiary with one hive? Clearly not. If the hive dies, no more apiary. Can two hives accomplish the goal, probably not. Three? Four? Essentially I think the only way an apiary can hope to be self-sustaining, and clearly there’s never a guarantee no matter how many hives, is to have enough hives so that there’s a certain degree of confidence in coming out of winter with surviving bees. And not only that, in accounting for dead-outs, enough bees must survive so that sufficient splits can be made to achieve that same minimum number in the coming season. I believe this minimum number goes up if a beekeeper decides not to treat for pests/disease, or at least the number has to be higher in the beginning of the apiary’s existence vs. later, once local selection pressures have killed off those not suited to the immediate area.
This feels like a math problem, so I’ll work on it maybe and try to possibly find a real equation to represent this based on a expected survivability probability.
January 1, 2012. Bees flying a bit, even saw some bringing back small amounts of pollen yesterday. Where they’re getting it I’ll never know. But this is giving me bad flashbacks of last year. We hopefully will have a more average January and the insulation will allow for some movement inside the hive during a warm day here and there, not a 6 week cold snap à la 2011.
Three days before Christmas and it went into the mid-50s with the temperature in the hive reading a whopping 70 and for the first time in a while I got to see the girls. What an excellent early Christmas gift. And everyone got a bathroom break.
It’s cold outside. Not bitter, but cold. It might finally stay cold. This is the third time since the freak snow storm that we had just before Halloween that I’ve said that to myself. But the previous two times I just wasn’t right. The following week saw temps in the mid-50s and bees flying. But as of right now the lows for the next 10 days are in the 20s with most highs in the mid to lower 40s. We may finally be sinking into winter…..’bout time.