Needless to say, after reading this thread I was scared @#$&T^less to walk into my little apiary. If the experts are reporting already such huge losses... Last weekend all 5 my hives were flying taking advantage of the warm weather. This weekend, of course, it's -5 outside and I didn't feel that the situation merited opening the hives. This is where the Broodminder sensors came in handy (I'm not associated with them in any way). Whip out the cell phone, and bam, the one hive I outfitted shows 30 degrees inside, but interestingly an almost 10lb drop in weight. Temperatures dropped bellow freezing in Dutchess County (2h north of New York City) all last week. So at least one colony seems to be doing Ok and working through its stores.

Both Randy and Charles raised issues about research questions in other threads. I just wanted to remind everyone on this list the interesting stuff that the Broodminder guys are doing gathering this data. Yes, it's simple weight, humidity and temperature (inside and outside), but if they reach their goal of 10,000 sensors in the world, wouldn't that be a wonderful candidate army for some baseline experiments? If anything, just the presence of data over a period of time can indicate the status of the colonies and the actual losses as opposed to self-reporting and estimation in the BI surveys.

I'll see if the Bee-L interface allows me to attach the spreadsheet of my data and a screen shot of the last 3 months of weight vs. outside temperature. Perhaps for the actual researches this is old hat, but I for sure enjoy this additional data point in my apiary management. For those who manage to open the CSV data, I've stopped feeding mid-October (you see the last spike in weight on Oct-18). The spikes in mid-December are snowfalls (wet).

Update: Bee-L rejects Excel, so trying only the screenshot. If anyone wants the actual data, please email me off list.

Przemek

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