Beehouse in the winter

Beehouse protects hives from bad weather. Special insulation is not really needed. More then winter freezing you might have to thing about summer overheating. Tree shadow could work well or you have to provide good ventilation, openings and perhaps some insulation of the roof to reduce heating of the inner air. That could help over the winter as well but is not necessary. Most important is to fill all gaps between the hives to reduce heat loss between the hives due to wind flow. You can put some insulation at the side of hives on the left and right margin of the beehouse. Inside of the hive is enough 2cm of polyurethane foam or similar material. Some are using only newspaper sheets, like 8 layers is enough. In case of using isolation foam, you can even open ventilation openings at the back door of the hive. In case of rodents access inside of the bee house that could mean special invitation inside of the hive. In such case rather keep openings closed and take care during warming up of the weather to dry insulation or even exchange with dry one.

My beehouse during winter 2005

Beekeeping in AŽ hive helps to understand bee bread processing

Old traditional way of bee management in AŽ hive includes also placement of the covered brood comb from the brood section into the honey section. In that way is released some place in the brood section to add frames with wax foundation. That is not really the perfect solution to reduce swarming behavior, but today that is not my topic. With this practice beekeepers often place also bee bread, which is around the brood. In the honey section bees will not use the bee bread, most of it is covered with honey and stored. That also happens in brood section, but usually just for a shorter time due to dynamic of the brood development and colony growth. Some could be left in the fall if bees have strong pollen pasture as well.

During extraction I got sometimes also such combs with a lot of bee bread*. Is such bee bread much better then just store in uncovered cells? We did some research and found out that it has stronger antimicrobial activity and that this might be due to processing by bees. Together with my PhD student Blaž Podrižnik we went in some further details. First results are published in Journal of Apiculture Research:
Maturation and stratification of antibacterial activity and total phenolic content of bee bread in honey comb cells
dx.doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2015.1090774
We have more results to show but we need some time to prepare some new papers. It is really great to know that bees have major role in preparing bee pollen storage in comb cell. A lot of new research is triggered which will help us not only to better understand bees, but also to produce better bee products. And hive could have an important role.

Janko

Photo by Blaž Podrižnik

* This practice is not very well if you are using synthetic acaracides to control Varroa mites. If they or their degradation products are stable and stay in comb's wax, they might pass into stored honey. In such case you have to mark such frames that will not be extracted for human consumption.