It is now the middle of February and time for another weighing. Going to the garden you can feel that the spring is coming. The first spring flowers are already here, snowdrops and winter aconite.
Now, back to the bees. The mass of the hive was today 23.4 kg, and plotted into the graph, the use of food is still pretty constant - about 40-41 g/day as indicated by the slope. So it does not look like the bee have collected anything from these first flowers.
In my last entry I estimated that for the winter the bees would need about 10 kg of food to sustain the colony throughout the winter.
But what does an empty hive weigh. I have an extra (identical) box with bottom, so I filled it with 10 plates with wax, and tied it up with the same band as the actual bee hive. That amounts to 6.7 kg.
When exchanging the plates with some from last year which was fully built and a bit of honey in, it weighed a total of 10.8 kg.
A bee weighs 0.1 g, give and take, so a winter hive containing less than 10000 bees, the bees alone will not even weigh 1 kg.
All in all, with only a little honey and a colony of bees the hive the critical mass of the hive would probably be say 10 kg and the bees would starve. Since the bees in a winter cluster are not very mobile and probably would not find honey at the very ends of the of the hive, the mass should never come below 12 kg
With 10 kg of food for the winter the minimum mass to start the winter with is about 22 kg, so give a bit extra the hive should weigh minimum 25 kg by the end of October.
I started the winter with 31 kg, so I will probably have way to much food left in the hive by March. I am expecting to remove 2-3 full plates so that there will be space for breeding in the early spring. What a waste of Apivert....
In my last entry I estimated that for the winter the bees would need about 10 kg of food to sustain the colony throughout the winter.
But what does an empty hive weigh. I have an extra (identical) box with bottom, so I filled it with 10 plates with wax, and tied it up with the same band as the actual bee hive. That amounts to 6.7 kg.
When exchanging the plates with some from last year which was fully built and a bit of honey in, it weighed a total of 10.8 kg.
A bee weighs 0.1 g, give and take, so a winter hive containing less than 10000 bees, the bees alone will not even weigh 1 kg.
All in all, with only a little honey and a colony of bees the hive the critical mass of the hive would probably be say 10 kg and the bees would starve. Since the bees in a winter cluster are not very mobile and probably would not find honey at the very ends of the of the hive, the mass should never come below 12 kg
With 10 kg of food for the winter the minimum mass to start the winter with is about 22 kg, so give a bit extra the hive should weigh minimum 25 kg by the end of October.
I started the winter with 31 kg, so I will probably have way to much food left in the hive by March. I am expecting to remove 2-3 full plates so that there will be space for breeding in the early spring. What a waste of Apivert....
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