> all other factors being equal, colonies benefit from more thermal
resistance in both winter and summer
Howso?
Anyone who has kept bees south of the (USA) Mason-Dixon line knows that
insulated hives are not a good idea during summer "down south", even if it
might somehow be true for the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland and all of the King's other Realms and Territories. Yes,
one can ventilate around the problem, but it is still a problem to be
overcome, and there are already days that can actually soften combs to the
point of collapse in the southernmost tier of states.
So again, yes, it is obvious that insulated hives start to be a big plus
once one is about a day's drive from the Canadian border in the USA, at
least in winter. But what of the paper's proposal to strive towards keeping
bees that NEVER cluster? What happens then? How many tanker loads of HFCS
would one need to get one's hives through winter? How does all that feeding
scale up to even a 2000 colony operation, never mind 10,000?
AND if clustering is so bad for bees, why do they do it so readily, even at
temps that are not going to cause any mortality among the outermost bees in
the cluster?
There is a significant difference between a thermodynamically closed system,
and the actual case of bees, an open system, where the outside environment
is a significant factor. There is also a clear massive difference between a
large cluster of Italian bees, and the tiny grapefruit-sized clusters of
NWCs. Both overwinter, but it should be clear that the two are very
different, as one would expect the smaller cluster of NWC bees to never
survive, using the "understanding" of the Italian bee cluster. (By way of
analogy, one cannot breed horses to the size of elephants, the
thicker-legged heavier-boned and stockier elephantine shape is a physical
functional requirement for its size.)
At the core of the problem, I think one has to admit that honey stores are a
variable here, being consumed and turned into heat by the bees "on demand",
that the center of the cluster is consistently and significantly warmer than
the outer areas, and that the work of Helmholtz and Gibbs may be worth a
review in the context of open systems.
We are well past the days of Galileo doing thought experiments and equations
about Dante's description of hell in "The Inferno". We can now model
weather over entire continents at spatial resolutions of 1 to 4 kilometer
square, so I'm going to guess that the "honeybee thermodynamics" model is
going to only be useful when implemented in the form of a computer model.
Recall that regardless of one's grasp of thermodynamics, we suddenly stand
accused as an industry of being "cruel to our bees" unless we keep bees that
never cluster, which reduces all the mathematical navel-gazing behind that
accusation to propaganda.
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