Jose asked how to utilize that heat spike: I have sitting in my living room a Thermosolar hive, which I will trial next season. The hive was developed by a Czech research team headed by Dr. Roman Linhart, who observed that Varroa cannot tolerate high hive temperatures as well as honey bee brood. All brood is moved to the upper super, the hive is heated via solar heating, carefully, and held there I think for 2 hours, then cooled....the result is all Varroa in brood are killed, but brood is fine.

This is not just blowing heat into the hive, the team talks about how difficult it was to overcome the technical challenge of raising the heat while foiling the bees' exceptional ability to fan and cool the hive.

Link:
http://thermosolarhive.com/en/homepage/

There is on this site also an interesting anti-swarm method discussed that revolves around drone flooding.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html