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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #12083  by MickBBKA
 16 Oct 2021, 20:16
looking at the discussions on other posts I thought I would start a new thread to talk about peoples experiences and thoughts about the various set ups they have and what they consider works best for them. This isn't intended to say one way is better than the other rather than just hear peoples differing opinions.

I use mostly wooden hives and for the first 5 or 6 years I had open mesh floors with roof ventilation and the crown board insulated & Varroa insert in over Winter. This worked fine although I always had small colonies and didn't really know any better.
Then I was gifted 5 colonies at a local farm whose owner had died. They were in ancient hives and probably not been inspected for 3 or 4 years looking at them. They were a mixture of nationals, commercials and Smith hives with all the frames mixed up as well. Some were nailed together and I had to crowbar the boxes apart. Inside the frames and dummy boards had woodworm. But the bees were in amazing condition. What caught my attention was they were all on the old solid Yorkshire heather floors, no mesh and solid crown boards with hessian bags ( smelling of creosote ) for insulation. The floor of every hive was immaculate. Not a sign of Varroa, deformed wings, CBPV or Nosema. Combs were jet black.
So I began to experiment with my colonies using solid floors and insulating the crown boards all year round and its been a revelation. Those colonies all grew faster, bigger and were more productive than any of the ventilated hives. Next year I plan for all my colonies to be sealed up.
This year there was another development which has never happened before in my beekeeping experience, we had a warm and sometimes HOT June and July , there I have gone and said it !! Now my bees reaction to this was to seal themselves in very tight. Every colony that still had a feed hole which I cover with mesh sealed it up completely. Several colonies even sealed up the entrances leaving just a few holes for access. I can only presume that they wanted to exclude the ambient air temperature as it was too warm for ooop norf bees.

I also have been using a couple of poly hives over the last 4 years as I had heard so many reports about how good they were and decided to get some. I have used them alongside my wood hives, sometimes with sister queens side by side, at different apiaries and different amounts of exposure to the elements. My experience has been very different to what I was expecting and I am in the process of removing them from use. I am not suggesting they are bad, they just don't work for my bees. I do wonder if there is a bit of groupthink around poly hives. 2 legs good 4 legs better. Anyway, they rarely overwinter better than the wood and are always flooded with water come the Spring inspections with several rotting and mould covered frames and comb full of stagnant water. I think the bees just don't seal the sides up on double brood. Once Spring arrives they are always blown away by the wood colonies. This I put down to the fact they are too insulated and don't warm up with the sun on them while the ambient air temp is still cold. I put a wooden hive and a poly hive in my garden so I could observe them in the sun. Some days the poly bees never left the entrance while the others were out foraging for hours. The big advantage of poly is the weight. They are a pleasure to work with but I now have a proper 4x4 so I can drive right up to all my colonies and weight isn't so much of a concern.

Sorry to waffle on, the wife is on the lash up at the Toon so just sat in Billy no mates writing this..LOL
 #12084  by NigelP
 17 Oct 2021, 05:52
Couple of points. I run all my 20+ poly hives from same supplier you got yours from and simply don't have a problem with water ingress. Me thinks you must have got a bad/warped batch.

Solid floors, you need good cleaners to use them. In the past I would find (come spring) some floors spotlessly clean and others full of debris that the bees simply were not removing.
My solution has been to run open mesh floors with a poly insert in all winter and spring (essentially solid floors for the best part of the year) and clean the debris that falls into them regularly. You can tell a lot about whats going on in the hive by seeing what falls on the board.
 #12085  by Alfred
 17 Oct 2021, 06:11
Timber nationals
Flat topped stand with no trays in the OM F- essentially a slightly ventilated solid floor.
Solid crownboards and 4" kingspan all year round
No condensation peoblems
 #12086  by JoJo36
 17 Oct 2021, 07:18
Hmmm, I have just 4 hives all cedar and never put in the floor slot, left them open all year round bar a very cold spell of a week in about Jan/Feb and then took them out.
Not sure whether it makes a difference where the winter super goes as mine this year (just to try) is under the brood box so possibly warmer if they are closer to the top most of the time?!
I've got a poly nuc box for spring if they survive winter and want to expand but, I think I like the wood. I haven't painted mine at all as I figured if they were different colours which I would like for each hive, I would find it irritating to see a super or eke added painted in a different colour if I needed to add one "not matching" ??!! :(
 #12092  by Patrick
 18 Oct 2021, 10:09
I realise we are in very different areas Mick but I have also noticed the times I have overwintered on solid floors they seem to have have built up quicker in the spring. I started beekeeping when Open Mesh Floors were very strongly advocated as a strategy against varroa and so converted nearly all of my secondhand solid floors to mesh and bought new as OMFs as well. I am personally suspect that the merits of OMF's in reducing live varroa were optimistic.

I know that mouldy debris was often seen on solid floors in the past but then they also popularly used material "quilts" rather than wooden crownboards which were reportedly often saturated from condensation and respiration from the bees by springtime. It's no wonder things got mouldy. As our options against varroa have improved, maybe its time to revisit the OMF orthodoxy.

For what its worth, I run all wood boxes with open floors all year round and blocked off crownboard feed holes in winter. To date I have never used top insulation above the crownboard, it is not a widely used strategy locally but that doesn't mean that the bees wouldn't benefit from some. I have certainly had years when colonies have come out of spring smaller than I would like - whether that was only down to lack of insulation I don't know.
 #12094  by NigelP
 18 Oct 2021, 11:10
my twopennorth worth.....When bees cluster they re generating heat to stay alive which requires energy (stores). Whilst the cluster is quite efficient at conserving heat it is by no means perfect so heat is lost to the surrounding space. How quickly that heat dissipates from the hive will determine how much more heat (and stores) the bees will need to use to stay alive. Hence putting a layer of insulation above the hive (heat tends to rise) seems quite a logical thing to do.
OMF drain heat from a hive simply by their nature of being open. Windy conditions will act to remove heat through the open mesh even more efficiently.
Hence I close all my open mesh floors off for the winter. The polystyrene varroa tray/insert that Abelo sell with their hives is ideal as it provides another layer of insulation.

Bees will survive through winters with a through draft of air created by a combination of open mesh floors and crown-boards raised open with matchsticks which says more about the bees ability to survive despite the adverse conditions their mentors have created for them.
 #12095  by AdamD
 18 Oct 2021, 11:42
I generally run wooden nationals over winter plus wooden and poly nucs.
I did have a Paynes poly National which I sold; there was often water - condensation - by the frame runners but the frames themselves were dry and bees wintered OK in it. I guess that if condensation occurs at the side of the hive and runs down, then there's no problem.

For wooden Nationals, for winter I will have some as single boxes, some as brood over super and some double brood, depending on the size of the colony. I have usually kept the mite boards out over winter. However my main out-apiary site is quite windy at the edge of a field and since replacing a 2 metre wide x 4 metre high hedge with a 1.2 metre wall, my home apiary is also windier. (Hedge/wall is on the east side with a field to the east of that and the North Sea a couple of km away). I used to see bees overwinter better at my home apiary before I removed the hedge a couple of years ago.

I now tend to leave the mite boards in - it also means that they don't get lost or mixed up as they are of different sizes to suit different floors. As mite boards don't usually seal very well (and the Thornes correx blows away), there will still be plenty of bottom ventillation with the boards in place. I wonder whether I should be thinking about allowing less drafts around the base of the hives. The sites are certainly not damp with stagnant air!

My feeling from my experience is that cold wind and open mesh floors slows down spring development, even with an insulated roof.
 #12099  by Steve 1972
 18 Oct 2021, 19:11
Poly all day long for me with little or no issues over winter..the only problems i have each year with the outer brood frames becoming mouldy is because a few of the hives are only on a small cluster..the hives on a bigger cluster have no problems with mould or damp..the inspection boards are firmly pushed in over the varroa mesh floors which to me is the only sensible thing to do with them being 0.5 mile away from the Northumberland coast as it can be brutal in winter with the howling gales coming of the sea..feed holes open or closed makes no difference as the deep Abelo roofs are to die for with plenty of insulation and no silly vents in them..
I see a comment about bees in winter foraging better in wooden hives when the sun hits them as apposed to Poly hives which do not forage as much..i find that very differently with my bees in poly hives..
Some of my hives get direct sun over the winter months and some do not.. however i can put good money on it that if the bees in the sun are flying the bees in the shade will also be flying which i have witnessed over the past several years..
At the end of the day it is a personal choice so just keep doing what you believe is better for the bees and most of all keep enjoying this marvelous hobby.. ;)
 #12100  by NigelP
 19 Oct 2021, 08:42
I find, despite all my hives being poly, that they will fly at different times. Sometimes it's a case of blink and you miss it.
As my garden hives are all sat facing into the weak winter sun there is not going to be much difference between the hives. But I can go out and see 3 or 4 hives flying strongly and the rest dormant.....30 minutes later the dormant hives are now flying and the ones that were flying have ceased.
Not sure why this happens, but suspect it may be due to size of colony with larger hives getting up to "flying temp" and heading out for toilet duties earlier than weaker colonies.
What I do know Is I don't like to see the bees making long foraging type flights in the winter/early spring months. Often temperature changes quite fast, like when the sun goes behind a cloud. I think I lose a lot of bees in the field at these times. It's why I'm a fan of landing boards as bees on their last wings returning homer will often crash into the front of the hive....and land on the landing board and are able to crawl back inside the hive.
Otherwise they fall to the ground and die as witnessed by the lines of dead bees under hive entrances in my pre-landing board days.
 #12101  by JoJo36
 19 Oct 2021, 13:46
Mine have landing boards and I do think it helps 'weak' or exhausted bees return to the hives for a rest and some tucker especially at the end and beginning of seasons:)