As you all know by now I enjoy mixing a little experimentation in with my bee keeping, well actually it seems a shame to waste the time when the bees are dormant by not furthering my own knowledge (and that of my fellow bee keepers who read this stuff too).
So what am I going to do this year?
Well one of the things that I was curious about was the survivability of a small number of bees under controlled conditions – which sounds a bit naff, so let me explain a little more.
If you have a colony of bees they must have sufficient numbers to care for baby bees, forage for food, clean the cells/environment and service the queen.
By doing the experiment at this time of year I know that the queen is replacing bees on a one for one basis – but is this enough to maintain the colony to March?
If I were to do this experiment in the field everything would be dead inside a week (the temperature would sort them out in the first night or so) – so I’ve put a frame of bees and a food frame into a display hive (as shown in the image below).
So what am I going to do with this demo hive now that it’s populated?
When days are nice, i.e. sunny and about 5 degrees the hive will go out into the back garden, the bees will then fly (if they want to) but more importantly they’ll clean.
when I refer to cleaning I’m not just thinking of walking round with the vacuum I’m thinking more of taking out the dead (they only live 6 weeks so if they’re not going out they’re going to die indoors – the bees will naturally take out the dead and ditch them).
When the days are not so nice they’ll be inside, the temperature will therefore be higher and hopefully this will convince the queen to lay a few more eggs.
when the weathers bad I’ll also be adding food and water to the hive (they’re not making honey for human consumption so I’m fine with feeding them sugar or honey left overs).
So what does it look like?
What am I trying to achieve and why?
I’m actually trying to see if it’s possible to keep a house bound micro colony alive across a winter and the reason for this is quite simple although not overly happy.
I’ve found that over the past few weeks the bee keeping association has been made aware of a hand full of cases of colony collapse disorder (here in Switzerland – and the really bad weather hasn’t even started yet) – so if I can keep a micro colony alive over the winter then potentially I can use the bees to seed a nucleus in the spring in an attempt to recover from Colony Collapse Disorder – and if they’ve been in all winter the hope is that the queen will not have suffered any of the damage that she could have otherwise been subject to out in the outdoors.
It’s one of those interesting experiments which is great for my own understanding but potentially better for the community as a whole (and if they don’t make it through the winter I’ll modify the experiment for next time).
I will of course update this page in the spring to let everyone know how the bees came through the winter (or how they died).
If any of my fellow bee keepers want some in depth technical or behavioral data about the colony just contact me, I’ll be happy to tell you what I can. |
