Bee Weather 2018

How my friends in Finland laughed when I told them we were experiencing an extreme weather event with temperatures of -4.5 Celsius and wind chill making it feel like -9.

The Beast from the East was sweeping across Finland too and they sent me their weather forecast for the week:  temperatures weren’t forecast to exceed -19 Celsius.

My Christmas Present Thermpro TP60 (see the Winter Beekeeping 2017-2018 blog ) has turned out to be vastly more useful than I expected.  I had thought it would be interesting to monitor temperatures in my hives:  I didn’t appreciate how truly useful it would be to be able to observe activity in the hives without opening them up.

The unusual-for-us-cold weather, (let’s not call it extreme), has had beekeepers all over the country worrying whether their colonies have survived.  Some have resorted to peeking inside.  That’s tempting but a sure way to chill the bees.  Apparently, in freezing temperatures, some bees can enter a state of torpor and bees in this state are sometimes presumed dead even when they aren't.

With the aid of the Thermpro and without leaving my kitchen, I have been able to see that there are bees alive in the hives.

To be honest, when I first set up the devices I thought they were just measuring the ambient temperature.   I considered that the small difference between observed temperatures in the hives and the ambient temperature was probably accounted for by the devices being sheltered from wind chill and the worst of the weather by being inside the hive on the crown board just under the roof.   

After a few weeks, the variance from ambient temperature grew noticeably.  By the time the Beast from the East struck, I was confident that the in hive devices were measuring bee colony activity, albeit I can’t tell whether temperature changes reflect an increase in the number of bees or how close the colony is to the sensor.

The following graph shows the ambient temperature compared with the temperature in each hive.   The trend lines clearly indicate increasing activity in the beehives.

This second graph shows how the variance from the ambient temperature is growing.

It's still too cold too open up the hives for the first inspection this year but both colonies are flying and bringing back pollen when the sun shines or the wind drops.    They still have fondant as an emergency food supply but trees are starting to flower now so it looks as though both colonies in the garden apiary have survived the Beast from the East 1 and 2 and Winter 2017/2018.   Phew!