Insulate or Not ?

[marion.orca]

My thinking is that I will put the crown board on minus the porter bee escapes, place a contact feeder over one of the holes and then surround the feeder with scrunched up newspaper. Not only would the newspaper provide a wee bit of insulation for the brood box, but also the feeder too. So the bees themselves would actually not come into contact with the newspaper at all. Would that not work ?

[Trog]

That will work perfectly. You'll probably need an eke, though I do have one lovely old roof which has room for the feeder underneath without an eke. As all roofs are different, I usually check very carefully that the roof has actually gone down properly and is contact with the eke/crownboard. If it's sitting up on the feeder mice could get in through the gap.

[Adam]

Jon wrote: -Adam - what size of winter cluster do you get on average? I would say 5-6 frames in November is about average for me.


Looking at last years records* my last general inspection was 2 October and most hives had 5 - 6 frames of brood. On 29 March this year which was the first inspection I had 3 - 5 frames of brood. The full-sized hives with just 3 frames generally failed to thrive and either tried to replace their queens in April or their queens remained in the hive but stopped laying so they could not then produce a new queen. My suspicion is Nosema of one flavour or the other.

It's noticable the Carni colony grew from 5 to 8 frames of brood by mid April (2 weeks) which is a rapid expansion. She did, of course, attempt to swarm this summer despite having 2 brood chambers to play in.

The only 14 x 12 colony I had grew to 8 well filled frames - which is quite a large colony - equivalent to 11 - 12 'normal' frames but failed to get much honey. Now if that colony had been in a National brood chamber it would have filled the brood chamber with brood and pushed the honey upstairs perhaps? Maybe an example of the hive being too big for the colony to get any return?

With the under-supering I do in the autumn, I did not need to feed the full sized hives in the spring as they had decent stores so I kept the insulation on into the middle of April I recall to encourage a fast build-up.

*Its really handy to keep old records!