maddydog
Drone Bee
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2013
- Messages
- 1,257
- Reaction score
- 159
- Location
- north staffordshire
- Hive Type
- 14x12
- Number of Hives
- 150+ nucs and hives
Ran a little experiment over winter by leaving the 'english style' feeder on 50 colonies. I used an eke with plenty of insulation and the hives are poly with a small square of mess in the floor.
Checked them all properly yesterday and the water in the feeder varied from 0 to around 10mm deep. The underside of the crownboards were bone-dry. Normally I would see the odd crownboard with damp around the periphery - basically related to cluster/colony size.
Pretty much all of my colonies are booming this year with extraordinarily (for me) low winter losses. This is probably more to do with the relatively mild winter and a honed varroa strategy but thought I'd post anyway.
Checked them all properly yesterday and the water in the feeder varied from 0 to around 10mm deep. The underside of the crownboards were bone-dry. Normally I would see the odd crownboard with damp around the periphery - basically related to cluster/colony size.
Pretty much all of my colonies are booming this year with extraordinarily (for me) low winter losses. This is probably more to do with the relatively mild winter and a honed varroa strategy but thought I'd post anyway.