Bee hive & book scorpion
News from bees and bee hives. Especially about propolis, grooming, building physics of magazine hives and tree caves.
In the last weeks I spent a lot of time to upgrade my system for recording infrared videos. I replaced the old 0.4MP camera with a 3MP camera with a wide-angle lens. The illumination is now via 9 infrared LEDs (previously one LED) and is now recorded at a frame rate of 60fps (previously 25fps). Continue reading “Upgrade of the Infrared Camera System”
The instructions for a new hive are now available under hive building: The Gruibert hive. The idea was born together with Gabi and Norbert Dorn. The goal was a hive with the following characteristics:
In the fall of 2017, I made Thomas Seeley an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse. I offered him 10 of my just finished Beeloggers to use in the Arnot Forest in the natural tree caves he knows. I wrote him an e-mail with all the information about the data loggers and offered to climb into the trees with him. Thomas Seeley answered quickly and firmly: Unfortunately no time. Continue reading “Tom´s Tree”
Almost 100 years ago, straw hives with frames were already used for beekeeping. The hive has a wooden bottom, the entrance hole is only a small slit, the side walls are made of straw and the lid is a double-walled wooden construction with straw filling. In these hives there were no problems with mould and condensation, although the lid construction is not highly vapour permeable. The construction demonstrates that humidity can also be carried away through the side walls by diffusion. Further information under Diffusion and D-cover.
In Wales, there is a region where treatment against the Varroa mites has been successfully stopped. The interviews in the following video were made in 2015 for the film “Outside the box“, which will be finished in 2018. Continue reading “Treatment free beekeeping in Gwynedd, Wales”
In “The nest of the honeybee” in 1976, Tom Seeley describes a random alignment of the entrances in tree caves inhabited by bees. Unfortunately, he does not give data on the alignment of uninhabited tree caves in the region. It is therefore not possible to verify whether the bees prefer a certain direction for the entrances of their tree caves or not.
The antiseptic function of propolis is generally known. This property slows down the development and spread of pathogenic germs in hives and tree hollows. However, propolis also fights condensation and mold in a different way, which is probably unknown to beekeepers. It is a simple physical effect: In the propolis layer there is no capillary condensation, propolis is not hygroscopic. Continue reading “Physical properties of propolis”
The Diffusion lid works, but not as well as calculated:
The calculations for the diffusion lid are basing on approved calculation methods of building physics. The difference in the temperature, the thickness and the type of the material are decisive for the amount of water vapor diffusion. Continue reading “News on the Diffusion Lid, October 2017”
You can see the grooming several times a day in my video recordings. Sometimes “Grooming Bees” appear and work off one bee after the other. Continue reading “Grooming Time”
In the following video you can see a bee grooming 4 bees in a row. Obviously, there are bees that have exactly this job. The behaviour is therefore apparently not only triggered by the perception of pollen remnants or parasites on other bees. Well, I guess there are real “Grooming bees”.