We’ll follow the progress of this native bee box with two probes, showing the differences in temperatures between ambient, edge and brood.
This is a two month old split of Tc in a standard 25mm box. The photos are from October 5, 2022.
It’s important to know exactly where your sensors are inside your colony. If you just drill a hole in the back and stick a sensor in you don’t know where the sensor is, and even then with what i have done here, you don’t know if the bees have shifted the brood over a little bit which could affect your numbers. You would have to open the colony and occasionally check the position.
December 2022
Below: “outside brood” has since been changed to “honey pots”
January 2023
Below: Three day chart. Day one and two the box only gets morning sun. Day three the box was moved to full sun all day with no roof.
February 2023
Below: Colony 1 and 4 should be similar in strength and use the same hive box design so just confirm each other for brood temps.
March 2023
April 2023
May 2023
Below: Same chart as above with 4 colonies. There would be quite a few differences between the colony strength, brood probe position and box design, though there’s only two to three degrees difference between each colony.
June 2023
July 2023
Chart below: Three colonies, brood and honey pot temperatures.
Photo of box with three sensors: The ambient sensor in the photo was only installed for a display at the 2023 Native Bee Expo and is not used for the data in these charts. The ambient temperature taken from this sensor would read as pretty high when the box is placed in the sun.
