If you can't stand the heat.. get out.

Had a nice sunny day today. I got home after a short but very hot drive listening to a little Social Distortion and decided to see how the bees were doing with the heat. Must've been pretty hot in the nuc as the front was covered in bees.

Getting some air, and shade on the front of the nuc

The main hives have their mesh floors open so they get plenty of ventilation, they also have the extra insulation of the roof gardens. The nuc however has the correx board under the mesh floor all the time unless I temporarily remove it to check for dropped vorroa. The idea is a nuc maintains a small population of bees whilst in a hive I'm trying to build up numbers as fast as possible so they can gather more honey therefore they have different ventilation requirements. In the picture below you can see the landing board of Hive1 in the background only has 2 bees on it whilst the nuc's front and landing board are pretty covered.

Bees from the nuc hanging

Sometimes huge numbers of bees decide to loiter outside the hive so much so that there isn't room for them all and they end up hanging from each other, this is called 'bearding.' I don't think this lot qualify as bearding just yet tho.

The nuc also has no current roof insulation and a covering of some grey flashband roofing tape which when was very warm to touch. Whilst there was a crownboard below it and ventillation grills on the sides of the roof it would obviouly still be very warm in the hive. Luckily I'm a fairly smart cookie and when I built the nuc I also made an insulating crownboard. It's got 52.25mm of spaceboard sandwiched between two thin layers of plywood. That spaceboard gives the equivalent of a 27cm thick layer of glass wool -according to the manufacturer anyway, so I'm sure it'll do a pretty good job of keeping out the heat of the sun. I didn't want to lose the little ventilation the nuc has though and having just one small entrance and the mesh floor usually closed this is a concern. To aid ventillation I left the existing crownboard with it's small feeding hole in place and put two small laths on it to hold the insulating layer off it by a few millimeters which should allow so air to exit via the feed hole. If the bees don't like it they'll just close it up. With the insulation in place I then popped the roof back in place on top of it.

Insulation from the summer sun

I'm possibly not all that smart a cookie as I didn't think of including a removeable centre portion to the insulation so I could add winter fondant, if I decide to overwinter these bees I'll probably need to make another version.

Thinking of cooling things The bees have finally started using one of the wildlife ponds as a water source instead of the grotty birdbath. The pond nearest the hives has an artificial (plastic) log floating in it. It's actually for terrapin tanks so the little creatures can climb out of the water, I added it as I figured young frogs and froglets could sit on it. The bees are now using this as their landing site.

Drink your fill! Tastes like pond water tho.

BTW you can now click on my images to see them a larger size