May I have your attention please? The following is not the real Jeff Vox really. If you have ever put on a B suit with nothing but underwear underneath, you might be a beekeeper. If you have replaced the grass on your front lawn with clover, you might be a beekeeper. If you have more than one T-shirt with a B slogan on it, you might love bees. Welcome to Be Love Beekeeping Podcast presented by our good friends over at Man Lake.
At Be Love we're all about the honeybees and of course the beekeepers. As I'm sure you know, there are a few different philosophies on how to best help bee colonies survive through winter. Today's discussion will be all about one path that focuses on high ventilation as a major key, and what you can do right now mid-winter to help your bees. But first, a few more tidbits and our fun facts about honeybees series. Did you know that bees are amazing navigators?
We've seen their spiraling orientation flights, but additionally, bees use the position of the sun to navigate, and there's evidence to of their sensitivity to the Earth's magnetic field. Also, bees' eyes are sensitive to polarized light, which penetrates through even thick cloud, so they're able to see the sun in poor weather. Did you know the honeybee is the only bee to maintain a colony throughout the winter?
The colony reduces its size in autumn and relies on its stores of honey to last through the winter months when it's too cold for foraging and there's no forage available. Speaking of winter, did you know that as honeybees cluster to keep warm, the queen remains at the center and the other bees take turns on the colder, outer side of the cluster? Sounds a little bit like penguins. Did you know that on warmer days, honeybees go on cleansing flights to relieve themselves of waste?
And finally, do you know why bees have a hairy body? This makes it easy for pollen to get trapped in the hairs, as the bee flies, its hairs become positively charged. The pollen grains are negatively charged, so the pollen is attracted to the hair and sticks. Now that you're a honeybee genius, let's get to today's guest. Welcome, welcome to Bee Love Bee Keeping, everybody, and we have a very special guest with us today, Steve Stewart, and we're going to be talking all about overwintering.
But first, how are you, Steve? I'm excellent because I'm in Mesa, Arizona at 70 degrees today. No, 60, it's in the 60. Well, you should have taken your bees with you because that'd be a great way to overwinter. I think they would make it, but you know, every time you change the environment, you change the beekeeping. So, I know the high Rocky Mountains, but I don't know anything about beekeeping in Arizona.
We did have on an earlier episode, we had a beekeeper from the Tucson area, and we talked all about everything from Africanized bees to some days being so hot that everything starts melting and oozing out of the front of the hive. It just sounded like some kind of horror movie. But your background, you did grow up in Utah. You know what it's like beekeeping in cold weather. Give us a little bit about your background because I know your father was in beekeeping too. Tell us where you came from.
I was raised in a little town called Spenish Pork, and I have like four generations of fathers that moved there back in the 1800s. And three of those fathers, there were four, my dad, my grandfather, and his grandfather were commercial beekeepers. So, we've seen the days, the hey days when beekeeping was really easy. And when I mean easy, they were. It was easy because it was the day of the insects before pesticides. And I saw those days and they were wonderful.
I was young at the time, but and then the pesticides hit one of the big vegetable companies sprayed seven one day in Utah County just and killed 2000 colonies and my grandfather's bees. And in one shot, he lost half his bees and that was the downhill start. And so pesticides have been hard on bees. And I'll give you some clue to that when I was young, I had to clean the windshields of the bee trucks. Oh, yeah, insects everywhere. It was a gooey, rotten, dirty mess.
And service stations, gas stations used to advertise they would have a services attendant cleaner and windshield. Well, that was a big deal because there were a lot of insects. And now I see a insect killed on my windshield. I go, Hallelujah. At least there's one or two survivors. I mean, the days of the insects, we declared war on them, Eric, and we want, but we want this one insect to live and it's taking all we've got to keep it alive. Yeah. You know, that is so true when I think about it.
In the summertime, every time I used to fill up with gas, I would clean the windshield because it would need it. Yeah. There'd be gooey gunk on there and I hardly ever do anymore. No. And I hadn't really put that whole thing together in my head, but it really makes, wow, scarily makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it scares me. I have a neighbor. I have a friend. He's about a quarter mile away. He's been on a year on a pesticide, 20,000.
Of course, he sprays alfalfa fields all around him for the weevil and and I've struggled every time you spray. So we have a deal. I have, I said, I said, what are you spraying with? And he gave me the three ingredients in there that most deadly pesticides to be. And I said, how about I give you, I'll give you three quarts of honey. I'll give you a hundred dollars of honey at the end of the summer. If you'll make a phone call to me and tell me that you're going to spray the next day.
That way I can screen my bees in at the entrance and they won't be flying and they won't be sprayed. We've done that for four years and he just loves the honey and I just love that my bees aren't killed. It's a win-win situation. If you have a farmer in your area that sprays, make him your best friend and all he has to do is a phone call or two. And I remind him that it's about spray season. Yeah, he got, yeah, it's about spray season. I've got it on books.
Yeah, he loves honey and I love to give it to him. And then the disappointment started to disappear as far as pesticides were concerned. Anyway, we are here today to talk less about pesticides and more about overwintering. You've had a lot of experience at it. And before we jump in, I just want to say I have read about, heard about so many different philosophies on overwintering bees.
Some people think the best thing to do is to wrap those hives up and insulate and basically make them like an igloo. And then they're going to be, you know, be able to stay warm enough to be okay. Other people think other things. Tell us where you come and where your philosophy came from. I was an engineer from Mars Incorporated, but just not any engineer. I was an innovation engineer and they are engineers that are cross discipline engineers. You have to be at least three types of an engineer.
You have to be a mechanical, electrical process engineer to really be an innovation engineer. And the last 12 years in my career was doing that. My company just gave me a free reign of a big budget and said, go make machines, Boris, make processes. And I did that. I knew I had to make three times of my salary every year to at least pay, make it worth their time. So I had to make them some big money every single year. And I set the time clock on January every year.
I said, now I've got to start making, earning my keep with this company. And they were, they had a global empire. Okay, they had pet food companies around the world and I mean around the world. And I have machines in all over Asia, all over Eastern, Western Europe, all over South America and North America. The only place I don't have them is in Africa, only one in South Africa. But I had impressive skills and I knew when I retired, I had such a good career I could retire when I was 50.
I've been retired 17 years. And I was going to use these skills to help the problem my family had for generations, winter kill. It was our biggest killer. I mean, it was, it was the elephant in the room. And we had it right down the percentage. And when bees were easy to raise, it was 18% winter kill every year. So we had to make up all those nukes every year, all that extra work and all those extra queens. I'm just, it was just, you know, because of winter kill.
Well, I had a new set of skills when I retired. I was going to fix this problem and I had no doubt I could because my philosophy when I was working for Mars is everything. And I don't care what it is, everything can be improved. And the second thing is nothing's impossible. If you want it, you'll make it happen. And so I decided I'd do that. First thing I did was I got three beehives and I was going to make them get through winter. And I left him three high.
They had two supers of honey and I made them basically an igloo. I put eight inches, eight inches on every side around and on the bottom. It was 16 inches. And I mean, on the top, it was 14 inches and 16 on the bottom. The bees had to walk through foam for eight inches before they could get out. So this was like R 30 or something? No, let's say you get about an R 20 for every 10 for eight inches of foam. I was 40, 40 to 50, something like that. And over 50 and on the lid. And I love electronics.
So I put sensors in the top, humidity and temperature and put the read out on my desk and I went to work. I mean, I let them go to work. They were ready for winter and something happened. I didn't expect to happen. They kept the temperature in the hive straight 84 degrees every single day. Unless it got down into single digits, it would drop a degree or two. Go right back up during the day because at nighttime it was colder. And I was really astounded. They would just keep it at 84 degrees.
I mean, perfectly. It never blabbered hardly ever. So that was good, right? No, this experiment was a failure. We'll get to that. So one, I think it was the first or second week in February. I'm looking at my hive because I love to look at the temperature every day. And I noticed that the temperature was starting to drop one or two degrees a day. And then the next day and other two or three degrees and the next day the same. And it got down into the low 70s and I thought, this hive is dying.
I have to do something as high was dying. And I didn't want to do anything, but I knew I had and I had a box of honey, a couple of honey supers down below. And in my basement, so I took a frame out and wait about 10, 15 pounds. And I tore the thing open is snowing, took a frame out. They were empty, took a frame out, put this new one in, put it back together. I'm thinking this is the last thing you want to do in winter is rip open a high boy is snowing. And I was really worried.
So I, but I got my, I got it back together, got myself cleaned up and went back to my desk. And I was really interested to see what the temperature was going to be. And it was 84 degrees. Amazing. But it was a failure because they had eaten themselves out of house and home in that amount of time. Well, that's a problem. That's not an answer. If they're going to eat so much honey, that's not tenable. You can't do that. That's, that's some failure. So I didn't know actually what to do.
Here's an interesting tidbit. I left the, the insulation on during the summer thinking it would help them stay a little cooler because we have some hot days in Utah. That was another failure because those bees wouldn't wake up till one or two o'clock in the afternoon. I wouldn't have thought of that. And I had some other highs by that time and they're out flying early in the morning and I'm looking at my insulated hives and everybody's in there still sound asleep.
This is why when you insulate, you isolate from the environment. When you insulate, you isolate from the environment. The last thing you want is your bees not to warm up when it gets warm early in the morning and summer. You're going to lose hours of beekeeping. Hours of having your bees collect honey. So I took that off and decided, you know, all that extra igloo insulation, it wasn't, it was a dead failure. I'm not used to failure.
So I thought, I did that because we had winter kill, winter's cold. Must be a heat problem. Well, I'll just put insulation around them. I mean, a lot. I went to the extremes because I learned when I'm making machines, you go to the extremes, you'll always learn more than anywhere else. And so I knew that's not even going to work in a little bit of insolation the way I did it. I let it slide for 10 years, but I kept my bees. I was actually more than 10 years, about 12.
I kept my bees and I suffered 50% loss or 60 every year and it was, it was a terrible thing, but it was my heritage. I wasn't going to give it up every time I went out in the spring to look at my bees. Then I would take the lid off and see them dead. It's just, it hurts. It's an awful feeling. Then you got to clean them out. Then you got to get everything ready and then you got to buy new bees. And it was a money loss. A hobby was put it that way. Yeah. And it is that heartbreak too.
Oh God. It's no fun opening up a hive and they've died and then you blame yourself too. What did I do wrong? It's like a sucker punch the gut. I mean, it just hurts. So I had a 90s something year old mother. She said, stay with us, son, you'll get it. Stay with it. So in the meantime, I had another project. There's, I wanted to fix the bees and then I wanted to change the way the world eats and provides their food.
And I wanted to do that in my backyard all year round without any additional heat source. And so I started, I started on that project. It took me about four years of research. And then I finally got some successful ideas that were out of the box and built it. It took me three or four years and now I can grow tomatoes in my backyard all year round without extra heat. And I've done that growing them 14 months straight.
But the point is this, I wasn't equipped to fix the problem with all my engineering skills. I couldn't fix this problem because it was outside of my realm of experience. But one day I'm out of my greenhouse. It's winter. It was January. But it had single digits the night before, which means the sky was clear the next day. 80 to 90 degrees of my greenhouse. I go out there just soak up the sun. I'm just loving it. Okay. And then the light went on.
I wonder if I could do something like this for my bees. And I thought, I've got, I've got four beehives right behind my house. They're going to die. They're probably dying right now. And here I am in the sun just enjoying this. And it took me, it only took me a couple of hours after the lights went on. Before I put my first solar heater on a hive. I built it like I would out of greenhouse plastic and things like that. I had the perfect hive.
I don't know what possessed me, Eric, but I had found a hive right behind my bee, my greenhouse. I have about 13 hives on my property. And I just was going to take off a box for it because get ready for winter, cut it down to two. And they had hardly any bees in it. They had half a frame and I'm looking at it and I figured out they'd just requeen too late in the season. They didn't have any honey stores. So I thought, I'm sick of buying new bees every year.
And so I just decided I'm going to try and keep this one alive. So I put a spacer at the top, put a bladder feeder in the top that I made and I fed it every day in late fall. And they would eat every day and then they'd go down at night. And I had put a clear plastic, clear Duralar covering on the tops so I could see exactly what they were doing. I'd take the lid off. I could see what they were doing. I could see if they were doing anything there or anything like that.
Because of the clear cover under the lid. So I was quite happy until God called and they wouldn't come up and I was hoping I had given them enough feed to make it through the winter. Which, you know, half a frame of bees, you know, that's a dead out. So when I got this idea, I bet I can do something like this for my bees. It only took me a couple hours to construct one. I put it on the hive in between the two boxes where the air could go in.
And then watched for a couple of days and they never came up to feed. So I thought, this one's a bad design. So I went and redesigned it with acrylic and made the airflow more streamlined and bigger solar collection area and put it on. And that day they came up to feed. I thought, I can keep feeding these bees all winter long. And I did and they got stronger and I had a good strong hive. The three really heavy hives behind my right next to them were all dead.
And I thought, I've got to do something with this. I made 25 the next year for 25 hives. Actually, I made 30, but I only had 25 hives. And I put a mill on and that year I only lost one hive in winter, which was a miracle. I never expected that. And I had feeders. I wanted to reproduce what I'd done. So I put feeders in tops of each one of them. A lot of them just didn't eat the feed because they didn't have plenty of honey. I always prefer honey.
But one little teeny hive didn't want to come up to feed and they didn't have a corine. They just lost a will to live. But it was a miracle. One hive out of all of them, 5%, I thought. And all the generations of my father's beekeeping in Utah, that just does not happen. Now, did I know what was going on inside with that? Heavens, no. Was it just a sheer dumb luck type of thing? I tried something and it worked. You bet. That's exactly what it was.
Well, your engineering dumb luck in mind would be a whole lot different. That's for sure. Did this have anything to do with moisture in the hive or just heat in the hive? At that time, I had no clue. Just a quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. Hey, if your weather is anything like mine, it is freezing out. So let's put our creative brains together and visualize spring. Birds chirping, flowers blooming and bees buzzing.
Now let's visualize you enjoying beekeeping so much more with some new gear. Or if you're new to beekeeping and not sure what you need, give Man Lake a call and their experienced beekeepers will help every step of the way. Protective gear, hives and tools, even packaged bees, nukes and queens. Man Lake has it all. And don't forget your discount code MLBLOV10, it's in the show notes, for $10 off your first $100 purchase. I'm feeling better already. Now, back to the guest. No clue.
So the next year I put the bees on. I did the same thing again. I'd written the patents in the meantime because I wanted someone to sell it. And if they're going to sell it, they're going to put money into it and they're going to want to have ownership. So I made a patent and found some people that wanted to sell my patent. And they're working on it. And they came out to my place to hot to film the bees that winter, which is the next winter. And that was the winter of all time snow in Utah.
You remember that, Eric? My hives, it was just nothing but the top of my hives. So there's hive stand, then there's hive, then there's three feet of snow on top of that. I had to dig down to even see that they were there. There was so much snow that year. That was a horrible year to launch or to show this company about that they want to sell my hive heater, a solar hive heater to boot. And I was keeping track of the days of sunshine. Hardly any.
We had two days of sunshine in November, two days in December, two days in January, and two days in February. And I'm thinking, what have I done? Now that's not the killer. The killer was since they didn't eat much feed because when I took the top boxes off of the solar heaters the next spring, they were all heavy. I didn't feed that spring. So I decided I don't need to put a feeder in the top of the bee hives. I think I'll just put some water and let them get a drink.
That is the stupidest thing I could have done. Okay, so, I mean, it was utterly stupid. I gave every single hive I have a bad, terrible case of no semen. There was poop on everything. And it wasn't just a little, it covered them. And every time I'd look at them, I'd go, how could you have been so stupid? What were you thinking? And that's just from them having too much water in the hive? I guess, because every single one of them.
I don't know what I did wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was related to that. And the hives that died were just inside, they were just a mess, a pooping mess. I just threw the frames away. So I'm thinking, what kind of a, I have winter kill rate, am I going to have? I had 20%. And that was still a miracle. It was back to my grandfather stays. So I thought, that's pretty good. Well, the next year, I've decided to figure out what's going on in the hive.
So I bought a scale off of Amazon and it's about a foot square to weigh your vegetables and things on. And that you would do at the market. I tore it apart and put the load cells on two beams, cross beams, so I could take those two cross beams, put it under one side of my hive, tip it up and put it on the other side of my hive and I would weigh it. And so I did. I got my numbers and this is, this is what it looked like.
And there's a weight distribution that goes from about eight pounds up to 40 and the average was 17.8 pounds. But a lot of them are right around 10. And I thought there were the ones that were right around 10 would die. And I was pretty discouraged to see, I'd never weighed my bees before and I weighed them every month. And those that had only 10 pounds made it through till March and I didn't lose, but 5% again. 10 pounds of honey for the whole winter. I'll show you.
In November, the average use weight was 1.8 pounds. In December, it was 6.5 pounds. And in January, it was three pounds per hive average. And I'm thinking, God, this is a miracle. Because they ate themselves out of house and home when they were totally insulated. And now they're not eating much honey to get through the winter. Well, I'm doing it again this year. And in November, they 7.5 pounds and December, they ate 11. So it's a little up this year.
You know, we had an Indian summer because you're in Utah. You know, the bees got more honey during that fall than they usually get. Mine were all heavy. Now my average weight in my hives this year was 35 pounds. And so when you've got that much honey and you've got a lot of bees, you've got more mouths to feed, they seem to be eating more. But it's really not exorbitant amounts. So I'm used to leaving at least 60 to 80 pounds of honey in my hives for over winter.
And you're saying November, December, let's say January, February, so four months or so. How much are they going to eat? Well, if they're on track this year, they'll be around eight, they'll be seven and 11. It'll be around 40 pounds. But that's still half what they often eat. But then you got to ask yourself, I had a good, I know it's all weather dependent and how many bees are in the hives this year. Since they had a really good fall, the queen didn't stop laying and it was nice and warm.
So they didn't reduce their numbers like they usually do. So I think that has something to do with why they ate more this year or they're eating a little more this year, but they've got it. I'm not worried about it. And they're never going to come close to eating at all. So I ask yourself, what's the mechanism? What's going on here? Because I'm just telling you what I experienced. It came to me that it really has to be the water. Now let's get a perspective on what this water really is.
And at the North American Honey Bee Expo and Louisville. Yeah, we were both just there. I started to really ponder it and I stayed up late one night, did my research on the internet. And because I monitored in chemistry, I kind of, I knew there was something going on here. And there's a man by the name of Frank Linton who wrote an article in bee culture. And he did this back in January 1st, 2015. And he went through all the chemical, all the chemistry that happens when a bee eats honey.
And how much water is generated in that. And he said for each molecule of sugar, it produces six molecules of water. And he came out to be about every, for every pound of honey, 67% of it will be turned into water. And I found another article who said it was 68. Another person found out it was 68%. So if you've got 100 pounds in your hive, you've got 68 pounds of water, you got to get rid of.
So he said in this article that if you have a 40 pounds in your hive for winter, okay, you're going to get through with 40 pounds. You're going to have 27 pounds of water. And I tried to look up just where, how the mechanism was in the bees, where the water came from. And I could, all I could get it from was respiration. They must breathe it out. What about condensation? Well, it respired, they do it from respiration from the bee and then whatever it hits it condenses on.
But I did a few calculations and this is really surprising. So okay, let's say you've got 40 pounds of honey, you're going to winter your bees in this year. They're going to produce 3.6 gallons of water to do that. The cubic inches of three gallons of water is 693. And the cubic inches of one length strut hive deep is 1,330. So actually that water will occupy 52% of the volume of that bee box is not just a little. So let me give you another to bring this home, how much that is.
If you've got 3.6 gallons of water, that's 432 ounces of water. And if you're going through four months, you're going to have 120 days. So you divide that amount by 120 days and you get 3.6 ounces. They will produce a day. Now, to give you some perspective, when you drink a water bottle, such as this, you get from Costco or whatever, that's about a pound of water. They will make that water bottle in four and a half days.
That's like opening your hive and pouring that water in every four and a half days, that whole water bottle. So where does it all go? Good, very good question. Well, the first thing you can, you can submise. It's 100% humidity in there, 100%. When they breathe it out and it condenses on everything that's around them, it'll either drip or stay there. You know, there's cells that will hold water and they'll just get moldy. I'm sure you've seen moldy frames before.
The first time I did, I was shocked because we live in a place that is so dry. There's no humidity, especially in the winter. And I had a dead-out one spring. I opened up, I'm like, what is this black gunk on the side of this box? Yeah, I get it. Yeah, it's there. If they're going to eat it, they have to generate it. And the only way they can get rid of it, they're equipped to get rid of that kind of moisture.
Even more so in the summer, they can fan it out while they're trying to take moisture out of honey. But when they're in a cluster, they can't fan. They can't, they can't affect their environment at all. They're just trying to generate enough heat to stay alive. So why did they eat less heat? I mean, why did they eat less honey to stay warm and a less insulated hive than an insulated hive? And the only thing I could come up with, Eric, is they're dry. They're much drier.
And their heat-generating mechanism must work a lot better when they're dry than when they're wet. Because when they're wet, everything they generate evaporates water, which sucks heat out of their bodies. So they got to eat, they got to eat more and generate more heat. It's a downhill spiral. It's like every day you get out of a nice hot shower and the first thing you do is get out and dry off because, dang, that water is evaporating off your hot body and it feels cold.
It sucks the heat out of your body. And all I can say is I think the same thing is happening to the bees. And especially when they're in 100% humidity, it's really hard to vaporize the bees, which that moisture is right around them because they're generating it. And not just a little. It's a full water bottle every four and a half days. The last article I read about this said that the bees, they take the oxygen, they need oxygen to oxidize the sugar and to get the energy out of it.
They produce CO2. And this author said beehives need to breathe for that reason alone. But I think it's, and you've heard this, I've heard it. It's not the cold that kills the bees. It's the water. And I guess the moisture that does, you kind of see that all bees eat honey in the winter and they eat a lot of it. And I think Eric, that they're in a survival mode. I don't think clustering. I don't think they enjoy it much at all. They're in a dump stupor.
If you've had to open up a hive that's cold and in that dump stupor, they're just, they don't even know what's going on. And I think they are circling the wagons and they're all get together and they're generating the heat in a big cluster trying to stay alive. Eric, when I look into my hive, my clear tops, they're all walking around. They're just thinking, God, this is great. I'm fine. This is good.
I look at them during the day, of course, and they're all nice and warm and they're walking around. They're not clustered. They can go anywhere they need to get honey or whatever they need to do. And that gets cold again at night, but they're dry and they can generate heat really easily if they're dry. This is full disclosure. I know it drives them out in the hive because I've seen it try out sugar syrup. But the next day, it'll dry out sugar syrup over time, but I know it's completely dry.
I can see there's no condensate anywhere, but the next morning I get up and I walk past my hives. It's cold in the morning. The solar heater on the outside is dripping water. Again, we're talking massive concentrations of water in the hive. And it's coming out that hole where the solar heater puts in warm air. It works in reverse on cold days. It actually takes the moisture out of the air by condensing. And on the biggest hives, especially, they're all dripping water.
On the smaller hives, no, but on the bigger hives where they have more bees, more respiration, the very next morning they're dripping water out of the out of this over here. And on cloudy days, it happens all the time. Go ahead and sum up what we're getting at here. What we're getting at is we have to fix a biological problem to get our bees through the winter, but we can't really see what's going on inside and they can't talk.
But the chemistry has showed us that when they eat honey, they generate water. Huge amounts of it. And you better find a way to take it out of the hive because bees, when they're wet, are very inefficient at generating heat to stay alive. However way you can find to do that, you're better off with a hive that breathes. If you insulate, you isolate. I do insulate the top box of my hives now because they do get to respire from the solar heater. Biggest ventilated.
And so it's warm air stays in the top and I do like to insulate that hive. I don't insulate it with our 50 just four inches of foam, not to eight. Go ahead, Steve. I don't mind if you mentioned your product. Okay. Because all of this engineering leads up to it. Yeah. It's called hive heater. Tell us what it does real quick. Yeah. You can go look at it on honey haven supply.com. There's videos at my place. The reason is for sale Eric is this. If you find something that's impossible.
I mean that you never heard of before and you never seen them before and you've experienced it. You want to share it. And the reason you want to share it is because you want to make a difference and you know, there's going to be a big change for a lot of people. And it's kind of dishonest just to keep it to yourself. I mean, how do you live with yourself? If you can help so many people, if you don't, how can you live with yourself? I couldn't do that.
So this product is already in production, right? I know it's quite new. Yeah. It's quite new. They sold their first batch last fall and it went out really fast. We went to the show with only two. They only had two heaters left and they kept those for display purposes. You still can't buy them because they're the new supply will be ready in spring or late spring. But you can go there and put in a pre-order.
I can't conceive of a better way to make a high breathe and ventilate and dry out completely passive. I mean, and so simple to use. It's cool. Can I ask you a couple of questions? Sure. I've had some people say, well, but bees need something to drink in the winter. And so some of that condensation is good because they need to drink it. What's your opinion of that? They don't need buckets full. They need a little and they generate a lot and they can generate that con.
Like I was telling you, they can generate enough to drink in one night. Yeah. And beyond that, it gets to be a problem. So as far as drinking water in the hives, that's not a problem because bees generate it 24 seven. They don't sleep. Now this interview is going to come out in early February of 2025. So it's too late. I mean, it's okay that you're out of the hive heaters for this year because it's really too late to stick them on for this winter anyway until next fall. Yeah, it's too late.
Can you think of anything else that people could do right now though? In the middle of towards the end of winter, if I'm worried about my bees, is there anything I could do? Should I take insulation off? Should I I've got entrances reduced because I want to keep it warm in there? Should I open some of that up for ventilation? Yeah, it's not about the heat. The solar hive heater should be said it should be named as solar hive dryer.
It can only put in as much heat in there as can escape the hive through the cold entrance. So you have your entrance blocked off. You've even made it harder for those bees to breathe and get rid of that moisture. Open up your hive. Open up the entrance all the way or maybe halfway all the way all the way. And I have a two inch hole in the bottom of my board for winter in case snow blocks that off. And I have them on stands. They'll have air from all that underneath. This is what I would do.
If I were right now and I was worried about my bees, I would take the top box and slide it back three quarters to an inch and expose that much to the bottom of the hive. That's gutsy. People are going to be afraid to do that. Well, then just try a quarter of an inch. But I'll tell you what it does. It's not going to steal heat from the top box. It's not going to because air rises, but it will give some air exchange into that box and let them get rid of that water.
I've seen it on a really good hive that a guy had. He let his son, very rich man, let his son have bees. He bought the best equipment, got bored with it and let him die. There were all 20 hives and a nice and he wanted me to put hives near his orchard. And I said, well, what about that bee art over there? And he goes, ah, that was my son's. I said, do you mind if I go take a look? And he said, no, go take a look. They were all dead, but one. And the top lid was a half inch back from the top.
That is crazy. Some people's minds are blowing right now. I firmly believe it's the water. They can generate all kinds of heat. You've had heavy hives die in the winter. I know you have, but we all have. Well, that cold air, once they get cold, that thermal mass stays cold. They can't generate any heat and they're wet. So they die. Let me add something to that. The people could do right now if they need this. And that is make sure that your hives are tilted forward slightly.
Because if they're even flat or tilted back, all that water you're talking about, it may run down to the bottom board, but it's still in the hive and it's not doing anything good down there. So if you tilt them forward even a little bit, if there's too much water, And also think about this. When I said move the box back, we're talking about a hundred percent humidity in that high. When you push that box back, you're going to get some air exchange with the outside.
That water is going to be busting to get out because it's a lower percentage of humidity on the outside. And you may get natural convection currents that just start taking water out of your hive because of a concentration gradient, we say in chemistry. I'm still worried about my bees freezing if I do that. It's gutsy. I'm speaking for the masses here. I trust you, Steve, but at least make sure your entrance is snow free. And open that up. They need to breathe. They really do.
Okay, Steve, before I let you go, I have one last question. I'm sorry I didn't warn you about this ahead of time, but on this show, all of our guests get to tell one wild and crazy beekeeping story. And it can be something funny that happened, something painful or embarrassing that happened, something out of the usual. Oh, I see the wheels turning. I just submitted to you my biggest mistake. I'll tell you one of the wildest things that it was sad, but it taught me a lot about bees.
I had a couple of hives on a guy's place who wanted them and he had horses, so he put an electric fence around them. He moved and the guy that moved in didn't take care of the electric fence. The horses got in there and just smashed them to the ground. Now I use a BMACS Styrofoam hive. So that they were just, there were no boxes left and the frames were down in the snow. Just beaten nothing. I mean, I was so mad. So I know I'm going to pick up what I can stand and some frames.
The boxes are just in pieces and I mean, it was stamped flat and I'm picking up out of the snow. And I pick a frame up from the snow and there's bees on the other side. And I look really close and there's a queen. And I quickly, well, I laid them in the back of my truck as good as I could, but I put them in a box as soon as I got home, put them in a box, put them on another stand, put a bottom and a lid on them and they survived that winter.
They survived that winter and they were down, beat down into the snow. And stomped by a horse. Stomped by a horse. It's amazing how resilient they are. All right, Steve Stewart, thanks a ton for being on with me today. You bet. Anytime. Thank you so much for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Please right now before you forget, hit that follow or subscribe button, rate and comment on the show. Then be sure to share it with a friend.
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