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 – Summer
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 – Winter
For June and July of 2023 I placed the hives at Pine Mountain Qld (Near Ipswich) hoping for some colder temperatures and we did get down to 3°C. One interesting detail here on colony 1 is that on the coldest day the ambient temp was 3°C, the honey pot area was 9°C and the brood was 22°C. So within the distance of the honey pots to the brood the temperature difference was 13°C. The involucrum was doing a great job here.
July 2023
Chart below: Three colonies, brood and honey pot temperatures.
Test: 17 December 2023 – Summer
Test 17/12/23:
- 2 hive boxes at 25mm thick hoop pine
- 2 hive boxes at 50mm thick cypress
- Each box type seems to be consistent with each other in the chart
Photo of box with three sensors: The ambient sensor in the photo was only installed for a display at the 2023 Native Bee Expo. The ambient temperatures used in these charts is not taken from this sensor.
