In early December, Gilliane welcomed fourteen bee-folk into her house on the edge of Oxford where we discussed insulation, annual colony rhythms and thermal photography of hives, with a large portion of gossip over a shared meal (traffic and flooding being a recurrent topic in Oxford!).
In the freeform chatting over the meal, we heard how bees in prisons teach respect and self respect, and the secret of how Gareth walked up to a scary hive unprotected, talked to it, calmed it down and earned the title “the Bee Whisperer” in Rugby prison. Arnold has noticed that “where there are horses there is no honey” and wonders if this is a general rule – his hives near horses survive but have no excess to harvest. I got teased a bit for furtively scribbling notes about what people said, like a secret policeman.
Claire brought up Derek Mitchell’s latest research on hive insulation. His new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society argues that clustering in winter is a last resort and the bees on the outside are not an “insulating blanket” as people have assumed, but desperately trying to warm up. This excited a lot of discussion, but everyone present was generally in agreement, unlike some web forums where this claim has proven controversial.
We had two short Powerpoint presentations –
Gareth on The Bee Year
Position of sun in the sky over a year. Image from Wikipedia
Gareth has been pondering alternative ways of looking at the annual colony rhythm. He showed us variations of a diagram, based on the analemma shape which the sun makes in the sky over the year, rather than a linear calendar; and described how this infinite repeating loop can help us visualise how colonies work.
My sketch of Gareth’s Lemma calendar
We touched on climate change when Gareth mentioned how a sharp early frost shuts down ivy’s nectar production and bees processing nectar in their hive. (Implied: the bees don’t restart and finish the processing, even if it warms again.) Any unripe nectar in the processing boxes then ferments, giving any bees who consume it diahorrea. If one of your hives smells like a brewery, that’s why – get the uncapped nectar out. This made me think of how beekeeping is an indicator of wider ecosystem health. In an online talk I saw recently, people talked of how commercial beekeepers they knew in Africa and Greece were having huge problems because plants were blooming at novel times due to weather changes, or not producing nectar due to drought. Their knowledge of where & when to migrate hives, is only part true now.
Thermal photography
Three TBHs in infrared. Nearest has a large colony – middle a medium sized colony – furthest is empty.
I recently borrowed a thermal camera, to check our own house’s insulation and see where I needed to improve it. Then I turned it on various types of hive around our village – TBH, Warre, National, Drayton. This gave false-colour pictures in spectacular hues.
Although this was fun, my conclusions were that it was very difficult to get much useful data without more experience, because I need to learn more about getting around the limitations of such cameras. Some hives could only be accessed in daylight and even on a cold day (3°C), the sun was warming some walls more than the bees inside. The camera had very limited resolution and a fixed focal point, so what you saw varied as you moved closer or looked from a different angle. I couldn’t see any wild colonies through walls, because they were so high up they were less than a pixel wide. Etc.
What we did discover, was that cavity walls are not great unless there’s something like wool inside stopping air convecting in them; that Nationals lose heat from a huge surface area compared to other hive types; and some insulators make a huge difference.
Experiments comparing heat losses with different insulators, including comb
I have now however obtained a new model thermal camera with many more pixels and features, so more on this subject in future!
Our thanks to Gilliane for generously opening her house to us, arranging a projector and hosting frantically over the soup and drinks! Also, good luck with the house move!
Next meeting: February (probably 17th) in central Oxford
Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group 
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