I am aware of that. It is shelter that they need, my point was that poly is better for insulation but most definitely lighter. I hope my back thanks me. But an experiment in concrete for one colony in one hive only proves survival. Bees will adapt to living where they must if they are able.
There may be a niche market for bee pizzas.Can I use concrete supers with my poly brood boxes?
James
conductivity of cedar about 0.1 concrete is 3.0, modified concretes can be as low a 1.0 so I've read. I remeber on Granddesigns some one mixed in crumbled expanded polystyrene.
aircrete blocks and the like are 10 to 30 times better at almost dry cedar i.e. 0.11 levels , but it has to be kept dry to get that. So a bit of pva both sides or just out side and propolis on the inside. 2mm correx cladding would also work. The issue is making the joints air tight and not thermal bridges so ordinary cement is out. Mastic beading on a roll is a candidate.
Honey bees the world over make frequent use of holes in the ground.
Unfortunately not that simple. They do leave, at least in the nests seen by myself and and one arborist, a layer of foam like material. of delignified wood. As regards the foam polystyrene, there a picture of honey bee making comb in thhe middle of a polystyrene sheet, in hole they have chewed. The facing sheet of recticel they will not chew but newpaper and cardboard yes. The criteria of chew not chew have not been investigated. Is it the hardness or tensile strength that limits the chewing? Is it the type of fungus in the wood? The behaviour has only the barest mention in the literature, in contrast to the energy the bees can devote to it, which is considerable. I suppose because you dont see it much in wooden hives it isnt worth investigating, which i think is a shame. One could hypothese that they need to attach the comb to material that is strong enough to support the comb, but how do they do that?
Becareful of generalisations when it comes to things like lifetime CO2 footprint. They can bite! You have to do the numbers, accounting for all of the sources for the given amount of "output" . In the case of bee keeping that could bee per: kg of honey, colony years, hectares of pollination. The sources of CO2 include the material, making, transport, the bees metabolism. If you do that you can come up with surprises for poly and thermalite hives.I'm afraid concrete would fair worse than polystyrene in terms of sustainability for me!
Exactly How bad it was would be down to details in the concrete, the design. e.g was there a crown board?was it sealed? how big was the gap to the "roof"? was the concrete water proofed? and the location. But starting off with a conductivity of 6 times greater than wood, when wood can be close to the edge of survivability is not a good place to be.
Derek, last week someone, who shall not be named
, postulated that regardless of construction material, with a beehive having a permanently open door the ambient air temperature inside will quickly equalise with the external. How do we repond to that criticism? I am a dedicated fanatic of insulation for bees but the best I can come up with is that any heat develeoped by the bees is lost more slowly in a better insulated hive. But I know that it is the cluster that is being heated and not the hive.hot air balloons have a permanent open door but they trap hot air because hot air is buoyant and it gets trapped by the balloon canopy, because the opening is at the bottom. The hottest air is the top and the coolest at the bottom. Unfortunately hot air balloons are not insulated so they have to keep topping up the hot air. A hive with an entrance low down is just like this. The bees heat the air, it rises and get trapped by its own buoyancy provided there is no top vent. Working against this are heat losses through the walls of the hive. In an insulated hive the cavity can fill with warm air and start to spill out the entrance. In a high heat loss hive the air can cool too fast and prevent it filling.Derek, last week someone, who shall not be named
How does a bee space slit underfloor entrance behave especially with a solid floor?
So what’s the edge of survival….Are you suggesting bees in wooden hives are on the edge of surviving?
Give him a chance .... he probably hit the post reply button by accident - he's hardly had time for breakfast yet. Less of the agressive questioning please.
