For those of you who have been reading the articles that I’ve been posting over the last year or so you’ll remember that last year I tried insulating the bee hives against the weather.
I did this using bin liners and the thermal insulation material that you’d use in your loft – and to a certain extent it worked.
The system did however have a couple of failings:
- Because I’d used bin liners the seams held water, not really a big deal in itself but it meant that when I came to remove them in the early spring I got soaked with cold, stale, spider rich water – as you might imagine that was not my first choice
- The local wild life had been inspecting my work and again, because of the material I’d used for the outer skin a wild boar was successful at getting in (didn’t get into the hive but did make a mess of the insulation for that hive).
- The space that was taken up by the individual ‘sleeping bags’ was quite manageable, however when you consider a bunch of them together the required space is suddenly a lot more.
For those of you who are now curious as to how I know that the damage was caused by a wild boar and not a dog, deer, fox etc I’ll explain.
The damage to the sleeping bag was underneath the hive towards the front. The ripped polythene had been puncture at the front and ripped backwards. The total damage was about 7 – 8 inches.
this tells us a couple of things:
- It couldn’t be a fox or dog, the animal would have had to crawl through the mud to get to it and then its mouth would have been in the wrong place to do such limited damage
- If a dear, even a juvenile, had done it the damage would not have started so far forward and would have been considerably longer (think of a dears head).
- I know that there are a lot of wild boar around my hives (they dig up the field, leave prints in the mud, etc).
- The height of the hive supports, angle of penetration and retreat is consistent with a boars head/snout.
So now that the forensics are finished lets get back to the experiment.
I’m effectively repeating last years experiment but changing it a little, so this year for example I’ve made the sleeping bags using swimming pool liner (it’s a lot thicker and harder to damage), the sleeping bags will now be communal i.e. one sleeping bag now sleeps three – this reduces materials, fabrication time and provides a degree of stability to the group of hives that they wouldn’t normally have (if the three are anchored together it’s harder to push them off the stands).
So how did I do it and what does it look like?
If you look at the picture below you’ll see the rolled out polythene, it doesn’t look that big but I had to do this work in the front room because I needed 6 meters without any obstructions.
Once it was rolled out and the insulation material chopped to the correct length it was neccassery to chop it to shape in places (as shown below).
Once glued up and having had the Velcro attached it was time to take it out to the forest – and this is what it looks like in place.
All this being said there remains only the actual technical proving of the sleeping bags – after all, there’s no point me spending hours making these things if they do nothing.
So what should they be doing – exactly?
1. Protect the hives from wind chill
2. Help the hives maintain a slightly higher temperature
So, here are some results that I put together the other day:
Outside Temperature |
Inside Temperature |
Inside Temperature (insulated) |
5 Degrees Celsius |
5.5 Degrees Celsius |
6.6 Degrees Celsius |
So, on a still day with a low ambient temperature the difference between ambient and insulated was 1.6 degrees – I’m guessing that on a windswept day when the wind chill is bringing down the temperature the difference between insulated and not insulated will be more pronounced.
And FYI – this might not seem like a massive difference but when you only weigh 5g anything is good.
I’ll update this page with windswept data as we get into January.
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