UK beekeeper Laurence Edwards explains why wrapping beehives in winter causes condensation that drips onto bees and damages colonies. Instead, insulate the roof most heavily, like you would a house, and use insulated feeders such as poly Ashforth or Miller feeders to keep colonies healthy.
In today's video, we're going to talk about wrapping your hives. Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? Now, if you're wondering what's going on with all these bees, I found a drone-laying queen, I shook out the colony, and I'm just merging it with a couple of nucs here on a beautiful late summer's day in North Wales. I had a few messages from people saying, is it the right time to start wrapping my beehives? I bought this hive wrap and I'm going to wrap them all up because I think it's a really good thing to do. I'll be blunt and I'll jump straight to the point here. If you are in the UK, there is absolutely no need to wrap your beehives. And if you do, you are potentially gonna cause so many more problems. Loads of bees buzzing around at the moment. They're really chilled, nice, calm, Buckfast from Black Mountain Honey. What you need to do is you need to think of your beehive the same way that you think about your house. Insulation is very, very important. But insulation in the wrong place can cause your beehive, and it can cause your house a huge, huge amount of damage. The most important place to put insulation in your house is in the roof. Heat rises, so if you have a nice warm roof, a nice fully insulated roof, you are gonna keep the majority of that warmth in. When you're dealing with beehives, it's similar in the same way to a house as well. But what's a really important consideration is that you do not want the walls of the beehive to be more insulated than the roof of the beehive. If you go down the route of using hive wraps and you wrap your beehive so that the walls are more insulated than the roof, all of that condensation that will be produced in the beehive regardless of what you do, needs to find the least insulated surface to condense on. If you insulate the walls and you don't insulate the roof, then what's gonna happen is it will condense on the underside of the feeder or the underside of the crown board, and it will periodically drip onto your bees. This is the absolute worst case scenario. So if you've bought yourself some hive wrap and you think you're doing a good thing by insulating the walls of your beehive and you neglect to insulate your roof, then you are gonna cause that colony So much damage over the winter. If you want my advice, don't buy a hive wrap. There is no requirement for them in the UK. Save your money and buy yourself a poly Ashforth feeder, or if you've got a nuc like this, buy yourself like a Miller feeder or any of the insulated feeders that go on top. It means that you can feed the bees all the way throughout the year, and you can just leave that feeder on and it will act as your crown board. What that means is that the top of the hive is the most insulated part, similar to the house. All of the warmth that goes up is kept in because you've got a really well-insulated roof. The poorly insulated parts of the beehive now are the walls. So condensation doesn't choose where to form, but it is dictated by physics that it will condense on the least insulated parts of the beehive, and that is exactly where you want it to condense. If it condenses on a horizontal surface like that, it will just drip down in the middle of that surface. If it condenses on the vertical surface, it just tracks down where that surface is. And if you've got an open mesh floor at the bottom, it just tracks out at the bottom of the hive. That is exactly what you want to happen. Regardless of what you do, whether you put no insulation or a crazy amount of insulation, bees produce lots and lots of moisture over the winter period. There's no getting away from that. You can dictate where that condensation forms and you can dictate where that condensation goes. By the setup of your colony and where you choose to put insulation. Don't buy beehive wraps, chuck them in the bin, buy yourself a polyash forth feeder, and believe me, your bees will thank you for it. Now, if you want to know where to get super calm buckfast bees like this, bees that kind of look like they're in attack mode like this but aren't going for me because they don't perceive me to be a threat, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. We have the calmest bees in the UK.
