> By the way, I will never be able to test a non-insulated hive in my location, I therefore have to rely on other people's data. 

Why? Because they would die? Most bee researchers are willing to sacrifice honey bee colonies to find stuff out. Seeley's early work on bee trees involved killing the bees:

> First, the night before collecting a nest we killed the colony and sealed the entrance. Second, whenever possible, we did not open nests before dissecting them in the laboratory. Seeley and Morse. THE NEST OF THE HONEY BEE.  lnsectes Sociaux, Paris. 1976.

The researchers who did the work with the thermocouples I mentioned also killed the colonies to determine the exact positioning of the clusters during winter:

> The colony was killed with cyanide and temperatures were recorded as it died. Exact determination of the cluster location in relation to recorded temperatures proved that such temperature records precisely locate the cluster and show where brood is being reared, where bee activity occurs beyond the brood area, and the insulating shell of relatively inactive bees. Owens, C. D. The Thermology of Wintering Honey Bee Colonies, USDA. 1971.

Lloyd Harris did decades of work on bees and never hesitated to kill the colonies to ascertain facts:

> Test of the model. To test its capacity accurately to estimate adult populations under a wide variety of conditions, the model was applied to 24 overwintered colonies and 20 colonies initiated from 0·9-kg (one pound) packages of bees. Throughout the summer, estimates of adults were compared to actual colony numbers by counting the adult bees from the respective colonies after they had been killed with cyanide. Harris, J. L. A MODEL OF HONEYBEE COLONY POPULATION DYNAMICS. Journal of Apicultural Research 24(4) : 228-236 (1985).

PLB

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