From: grizzly bearnolds <mkittner@telus.net>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 22:59:19 -0800
To: BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Artificially heated wintered hive

>I am told that in US government experiments on overwintering with packed,
>artificially heated, and normal overwintering colonies, that it was the
>pollen stores that gave the edge to the bees in overwintering well!

I am noting the info on "pollen makes a hive come through winter". Alright.
Not much I was able to do about that during the last season (not enough
know how yet). I observed though that last season more pollen than normal
was brought in by the bees. So maybe there is already a plus for them.

Now - it was mentioned a few times, here on BioBees and elsewhere ..
"artificially heated". Could this be described a bit more, what is meant by
that?

Some years ago, when we had losses due to winter moisture, it was
recommended to us and we made use of this, though I never heard anyone else
using this system nor agreeing to it. This year of course, we are going to
the complete opposite with our open mesh floors.

Husband built a box, 12" high, enclosed, insulated with some styrofoam, not
fancy. Two hives could be set onto the box, side by side, then wrapped up
and insulated. On top of the box, he cut a few slits into the top, so that
any "heat" could escape upwards, and hit the bottom boards of the hives
(actually we may not have used a bottom board at all, the top of the box
became the bottom of the hives). Inside the box was one light fixture with
a 40 or 60 watt light bulb. The hives were on the box all winter. The light
bulb burned continually once temperatures hit approx. - 10 C / 6 F. Really,
not much "heat" was generated, but it seemed to have been enough so that
the hives more or less stayed dry. This seemed to help. Though as I said,
this was recommended to us as "should be done in this area", but we never
heard of anyone actually doing it, besides us. Also whenever I mentioned
this in the past, it was always a no-no never do that.

Off Topic - I posted several photos of the new beehouse into the photo's
section of the BioBees List. Also there's a close-up photo of Ma Grizzly in
there.

Ma. / Nass Valley .. British Columbia .. CANADA