Allen Dick wrote: ↑April 8th, 2017, 4:27 pm
You are south of me, but
I would not take off the wraps until May unless I had to for some reason. In my experience, the hives need protection at this time of year as much or more than any other. Only unwrap and consider supering if the hives start hanging out and bearding.
Allen is right (of course). Last year, 1/2 of my hives had the insulation removed in April. The other 1/2 did not get their insulation removed until the end of May, when they started bearding outside the boxes.
Here is what I found- all of the hives that had the insulation off in April had six frames of brood in each box (12 frames total for each double deep). The hives that had the insulation left on until later had
eight frames of brood in each box (16 frames total for each double deep).
I kind of suck at math, but that looks to me to be about a 25% improvement in brood build-up and it didn't cost me anything extra to get it. (Actually, I kind of think it might be more than 25%, if someone with a numbers brain were to do the math?)
At any rate, this unintentional experiment showed me that insulation left on later allows them to expand the brood nest faster and further than those without insulation. When I saw the amount of brood in the first late insulation removal, I thought it was a fluke, but the results held true for *every* hive that still had insulation on. The uninsulated hives were also uniform in their numbers of frames of brood, which tells me that it is the insulation that makes the difference.
I wish I could say that I thought of it on my own, but the fact is that it came from laziness and bad beekeeping that turned out to be good.
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On another site where it is sometimes difficult to wade through the BS, there were some folks recently who were poo-poohing the idea of insulating hives here in cold country, saying stuff like "I don't insulate, it gets to 20 below and my hives make it just fine, there is no need for it."
Well, they may make it, but they are closer to the verge of failure, and any extra stress, mistake or mishap could result in losses that could have been avoided. (Plus, they are likely to be significantly behind the curve when it comes to Spring build-up.) This was shown to me this past December when I got hit with an early cold snap where the temps went sub-zero (near -20F) very suddenly, and were coincidental with high winds (plus 60mph). I had not yet got around to insulating at that time since I generally don't expect it to get that cold until Jan/Feb. Most of the hives survived, though many of them suffered from condensation issues. But I made a mistake with one of them, in that I missed putting in an entrance reducer- that one additional factor killed that hive, with sub-zero winds into the wide-open bottom entrance.
I'll be insulating earlier from now on, and leaving it on later.