>
> >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"
>

I have no experience in the humid south, so can someone please provide any
published research on the effect of hive insulation
during summer in the South?  Or even unpublished comparative trials by a
beekeeper?

In Australia, insulated hives are claimed to result in better performance
during the summer.  Ditto for the study from Saudi Arabia.
Some of us beekeepers in increasingly-hot California are also experimenting
with insulation during summer.

>
> >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?
>

I've attached a slide that I created.  Colonies use the least amount of
winter stores at ~41F.  That's well above freezing.
So in cold-winter areas, having enough insulation to prevent the cavity
temperature from dropping below 41F would decrease honey consumption.
So the question would be, how much more honey would be consumed if the
cavity temperature was maintained at 55F -- the temperature at
which a cluster "loosens."  This would be an easy test to run in a couple
of refrigerated chambers.

The beekeepers that I've visited in Sweden, which has very cold winters,
swore by insulated hives.  Toomema's studies indicate that they better
control where metabolic water winds up condensing.

>
> >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?
>

The author made a big stretch to suggest that "As the temperature outside
the hive falls, bees around the mantle go into hypothermic shutdown and
stop producing heat."
Stabenthaler's thermal imaging completely refutes that claim, since the
mantle bees take turns generating heat.  They allow their abdomens to
chill, but maintain the temperature
of their thoraces and heads.

Ditto for the claim that "Unlike the bees in the mantle, there aren’t any
penguins in a hypothermic shutdown."
It is well established that the mantle bees are there by choice, and freely
move into the cluster from time to time to warm up enough to allow their
physiological enzymes to work.

>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.


Agreed, two races evolutionarily adapted to different environments.  I
suggest reading Bernd Heinrich's book "Winter World," in which he describes
how species of tiny birds survive extremely cold winters (Also read his
book "The Thermal Warriors," on strategies of insect survival.

 I'm personally quite interested in Mitchell's hypotheses, and am
installing a thermister in an insulated outdoor observation hive today.

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