Check your girls' winter stores!

4 weeks ago, my honey super was about 40% filled with nectar. The girls either moved it closer to the brood or ate it. At any rate, I put some more feed to them because they were running low. :slight_smile:

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I finished feeding at the end of September. I didn’t look in but I weighed the hives. I know what each should weigh roughly and I aim for 35 lbs of stores ( bees in a well insulated poly hive use fewer stores). I was happy with all of them.
October has been warm and the bees have been busy on the ivy and are still brooding judging by the detritus on the inspection board. I weighed them last week expecting to have to feed some. What a surprise…every one had gained, some 25lb!!!
I can see I’ll be taking brood frames of stores off in the Spring

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Looking at that medium, I would guess that it couldn’t have held more than about 12lb or 5kg of nectar, and probably a lot less. I am truly delighted to say that I now have a working Arnia hive scale and monitor, so I can show you how useful that is! :smile:

This is one week of weight data. You can see that the bees use about 100-200 grams of stores per day.

For a week, that is up to 1.4kg or about 3lb. So @Bobby_Thanepohn’s observations and mine agree - 12lb of stores will last around a month, depending on your climate.

Of further interest is that my queen is still laying, like Bobby’s. I know this because the brood temperature monitor is stable at 33 to 34C. If she stopped laying, it would drop. Here is a screenshot of today’s UI graphic from the Arnia, showing you brood temp etc:

I have to give credit to Arnia’s customer support. We have had a lot of teething trouble with the system, but they have willingly replaced hardware, and we are now getting some truly helpful data from the setup.

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That’s pretty cool @Dawn_SD.

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Thank you for sharing Dawn. I’ve been looking at this system and sent a request for price and more information before I came across your post. Do you know how long the batteries last?

Hi there! The system has two components needing batteries. If you have the Pro-Scale, they say the Hive Monitor batteries should last 6 months - it takes four D-Cell standard alkaline batteries. Mine only lasted less than 3 months, but the system was faulty, so it probably drew more power than needed. If you have the standard Monitor, it takes 4 AA batteries and they last about 3 months. I highly recommend the Pro Scale though - they may not quote you for it unless you ask about it. The difference is a much better weighing platform for the hive, and nicer monitors with improved ease of access for battery changes - no need to take the hive apart.

The other component is the Gateway Monitor. This is a kind of cellular modem. Mine was very problematic to start with, and I have gone through 4 sets of batteries in 3 months. It also takes 4 D-cell alkaline batteries. I also have the add-on solar kit, but I have had problems with needing to move the gateway around to solve reception issues (it uses 2G cellular data), so the solar kit hasn’t always had the best exposure. It seems a lot more stable now.

I would guess in the future I will need to replace 4 D-cell batteries every 4-6 months between the 2 units and allowing for the solar power.

Hope that helps. If you order, tell George that I sent you, and say hello to Wilma and Samantha in customer support. They are all good people. :wink:

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Good stuff Dawn. Keep those stats coming it’s fascinating. It’s good to see the differences in different climates. 35 lbs of stores here lasts maybe four/ five months here so our bees appear a little more frugal. how little brood will the temperature sensor detect? I can tell if brood has emerged by the cappings on the inspection tray

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Mine are Italians, so perhaps that is the difference. I would bet that Bobby’s are too.

I am not really sure. The probe is about 3mm wide and approximately 2cm long, but some of that must be housing for the wiring and connections. The advice is to put the probe in the centre of the best area of brood, dangling it between 2 frames. I would guess that as long as there is enough brood to stimulate the bees to heat the hive, and the queen is laying in the centre frames, there will be a reliable reading. I have seen a chart where the queen went up through the queen excluder and started laying in the supers. In that case, the brood temperature dropped pretty convincingly. Of course, I don’t know exactly how long she went up before the temperatures started falling. I could speculate that it should be 1-3 weeks, but I have no personal experience of data on that.

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Of course…the obvious explanation. thank you

Ditto - Italians as well

I opened up my hive yesterday to get a look at their stores, reduce my entrance down for winter size (about an inch) and add a block of candy and things didn’t go quite as expected…

They had not added much honey since the last inspection on 9/27 - it has been warm (for October and November), there’s been a fair amount of traffic and orientation flights. There is some forage around (goldenrod and aster) and I see the occasional bee still bringing in pollen. I decided to put a block on candy on top as an insurance policy…

I took the insulation and quilt box off and there were lots of bees. A few hive beetles so I put a couple oil traps in.

When I tried to put the candy on top of the top bars it disintegrated and fell, partially onto the ground and partially onto the frames. So I gave up on the insurance and cleaned up what I could and noticed that the bees were carrying small pieces out and dumping them. The bottom tray had quite a bit in it that fell through.

I’ll go back to my original plan on making some fondant and placing it on the bars on the first warm day in February or March.

I have a inexpensive Bluetooth temperature and humidity on top of the bars in the lower box. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MZYPO48/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_K.-PFbWHNRC8F

Could you give me some insight on the graph (and any other general advice) and tell me if the sensor is just kaput or if there is some explanation for the jump in temperature right when the inspection was finished. Did all the activity in the hive make the bees overheat? It is 72°F yesterday and 45°F overnight.

Thanks!

I have only used temperature probes in the middle of the brood nest, not on top bars, so I can’t give you an answer from experience. In the middle of the brood nest, temperature is pretty reliably held at around 35°C (95°F). I think the center portion of you graph probably reflects that. I would imagine that the spike at the end may have been from all of the clean up activity that you saw with fragments of candy being moved around. I don’t think that such a brief spike would have done any harm - 103°F would not be lethal short term.

I haven’t used candy - in my SoCal climate, I don’t need it. I think @Eva has done, although I think she uses granulated sugar now. Perhaps she can enlighten us. :wink:

The probe is on the top bars of the lower brood box, so just above the current brood area and I suppose in the middle of the winter brood area.

I didn’t know they would super heat the hive when it is cool out just with clean up activity. Good to know it won’t be harmful. There probably is very little brood.

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Granulated sugar, on a small sheet of newspaper placed on the top bars makes an easy, no fuss way to feed in cold weather :+1:

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You just pour the loose sugar on the newspaper?

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