Thorne's news & matchsticks

[user 6228]

You mean my measuring? I push the digital thermometre in the middle of cluster via upper entrance in front Wall.

When the colony is alarmed, it expands to the whole box. Thermometre was in the middle of box.

Humidity means nothing in such few hours happening.

IT was December and no brood existed. 23C cluster tells it.
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highest temperatures are likely to be in summer when they are ripening the honey.

 

[Finman]

highest temperatures are likely to be in summer when they are ripening the honey.

No. They keep temp temperature very steady, at least in my climate.

I think that 42C temp is alarm issue. Bees rise they muscle temperature and they are ready to fight against enemy.

Bees' fast flying temp is in muscles 39C.
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If hive is too hot in summer, they stop working.

 

[user 6228]

No. They keep temp temperature very steady, at least in my climate.

I think that 42C temp is alarm issue. Bees rise they muscle temperature and they are ready to fight against enemy.

Bees' fast flying temp is in muscles 39C.
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If hive is too hot in summer, they stop working.

I will have to measure the temperature distribution in a tall hive when they are ripening honey this spring. They have to put in heat to ripen the honey, and they need the RH in the cells to be low. In our hives they leave the honey uncapped for long periods after ripening and the final water content is very low i.e. 16% . This all points to higher temperatures in the honey space compared to the brood space. The measurements will tell if and how much.

 

[Finman]

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If the cells of comb are not full, they do not cap the honey.

When flow stop in my hives, they stop working on combs.

Your yields in Britain are quite small. It means that yield comes quite slowly into the hive. Sometimes they eate what they have got and sometimes they continue storing.

Last summer I had in some hives 3 boxes capped honey in June. Then it begun rainy weathers. After 3 weeks the hive had only one capped box.

After summer our beekeepers were desperate, because most of their yield was uncapped. Reason was poor flow. It stopped totally in the middle of summer.

 

[masterBK]

derekm wrote "They have to put in heat to ripen the honey, and they need the RH in the cells to be low. In our hives they leave the honey uncapped for long periods after ripening and the final water content is very low i.e. 16% . This all points to higher temperatures in the honey space compared to the brood space"

When bees are ripening honey in my hives they tend to be well spread out with lots of fanning going on and increased air flow in/out. But do they really need to add heat? If washing is put out on a cold but dry day it still gets dry. Surely if the air brought in to the hive is not saturated and that ventilated air out is saturated or nearly so then water content of the nectar will still decrease by evaporation. Of course the higher the temperature the more water vapour the air will hold at saturation point but is adding heat an efficient use of such energy when they don't need to do it.

 

[Finman]

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When good flow is going, a big hive can handle 5-7 kg honey in a day. What is the amount of nectar coming on, I do not know. Drying nectar keep the hive cool. Working bees give heat to the hive.

Sometimes when the fliw is huge from rape, bees stop wotking and make a big cluster into the shadow side of the hive.

When rape field is over 1 km distance from hive, I have not met clustering on out hive fall. These hives get only half from the yield, what the hives get which on the side of rape field.

Xxxxxxx

An Australian bee researcher told that when the out temps were over 40C, nucs' brood died. Big hives absconded in the heat.

The reason is that the earth in front of sunny place of hive is hot. much more higher than in shadow The soil is hot, and beehive takes that hot air from the level of ground, when it ventilates.

Combs melted partly and then arrived small hive beatles to the party.

It is reported about Australian feral bees, that they can live only near water ponds. They get cooling water from pond.


But you find good text from google with term "beehive temperature control"

. We have seldom over 30C temp. But that is in shadow. IT is not same air what bees take in in hot days.

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[user 6228]

derekm wrote "They have to put in heat to ripen the honey, and they need the RH in the cells to be low. In our hives they leave the honey uncapped for long periods after ripening and the final water content is very low i.e. 16% . This all points to higher temperatures in the honey space compared to the brood space"

When bees are ripening honey in my hives they tend to be well spread out with lots of fanning going on and increased air flow in/out. But do they really need to add heat? If washing is put out on a cold but dry day it still gets dry. Surely if the air brought in to the hive is not saturated and that ventilated air out is saturated or nearly so then water content of the nectar will still decrease by evaporation. Of course the higher the temperature the more water vapour the air will hold at saturation point but is adding heat an efficient use of such energy when they don't need to do it.

Making water evaporate takes heat/energy at whatever temperature at whatever airflow. Dont confuse temperature and heat. If the bees don't supply extra energy then the temperature of the nectar and the air will drop. To keep the bottom of the hive at 34C means you will have to higher temperature at the top of the hive.but evaporation will remove heat at the top, needing more heat at the bottom. Note The fanning action inside is also supplying considerable heat from the bees thorax. From the noise my hive makes there are a lot of bees inside fanning and thats a lot of heat being produced.

 

[REDWOOD]

So what is the temperature of the hive when they are ripening honey, is the air flow strong enough to keep the temperature normal with the extra heat generated by the fanning


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Brian Bush]

Now you mix things very badly.

Hymenoptera is largest insect group in the world. And "bee" named species are huge number. What you mean by "bees", I do not know.

Most Apis cerana colonies do not live in cavities in Japan.v! And cerana does not drop cluster temperature during winter. Cerana and mellifera are only Apis, which make several combs side by side. Others make only one comb.

Mellifera has evolved in Africa or in Near East. Who knows what was vegetation in those times.

I have not met any evidencies that clustering started on Himalaya. After 2003 genemapping changed everything.

For example a common wasp has insulated hive and it keeps brood teperature high. Same does bumbble bee. Bumbble wants insulated hive.

Sorry Finman the researchers at Upsalla University published a paper in Nature on 24/08/2014that showed, following their global analysis of genome variation that Mellifera most probably originated in Asia not Africa as previously thought..
Follow this link

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.312/abstract

 

[Finman]

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OK. A while ago it was near Israel, and now somewhere else. I had old newspaper.
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[Finman]

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Ofiginal Apis mellifera races. What has happened on globe, that Apis mellifera was only in Europe and Africa. Other Apis species live in Asia.

Apis cerana

15 years ago there was a very logical hypotesis, how mellifera has born in Europe. And how Black Bee was the original bee race. Then genemap changed everything to controversy.

So, a new era of hypotesis has begun. .
OVERWINTERING BEES IN
COLD CLIMATES 10
Canada - David Dawson
Russia - Vitaliy Petrovsky
Ukraine - Dr Alexander Komissar
Sweden - Kristoffer Hillebrandt

http://www.ninevehtrust.org.uk/images/pdfs/bkq 103_lr.pdf

year 2011

 

[Fusion_power]

The suspected cause of the 6 mya separation of eastern vs western cavity dwelling honeybees is hypothesized to have been desertification across the Arabian peninsula which split the progenitor of Mellifera and Cerana into two populations that diverged into modern species that are incapable of interbreeding. The cause of retention of genetic diversity in Africa has been hypothesized to be an artifact of ice ages over the last 2 million years. If these hypotheses are correct, western honeybees spread into Northeast Africa about 6 million years ago, were isolated from Cerana by desertification, but continued to spread into Africa. Then the ice ages permitted expansion and retraction into Europe from Northwest and Northeast Africa. These speculations do not account for Apis Nearctica which has been dated to about 15 mya. For all intents and purposes, A. Nearctica is a modern honeybee though there is no evidence to support it having been a cavity dwelling bee.

The most significant disparity with this theory is that Apis Mellifera can be reasonably well dated to about 1.2 mya, but the divergence from Cerana is about 6 mya. There is a 4.8 million year gap that is not explained.

 

[maddydog]

this obviously is talking about the honey area above the brood

Is it? Coz my brood comb has a number of cocoons in it, my honey comb does not.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Another thread down the Swanee

 

[maddydog]

Another thread down the Swanee

Eh? **** creek without a paddle more like. I thought the whole idea was to meander quickly off topic, certainly my impression

 

[Finman]

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[Finman]

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4,602 views

Not bad