Steve said

>> I decided this year to monitor the temperature and relative
>> humidity...

Jerry said:

> Before you do anything else, place the HOBO inside a hive in middle
> of the stack.  Its not the room humidity that's critical, its what's
> going on inside the brood nest.  In other words, if the RH is high
> inside the hives, you don't want to increase RH in the building.
> If its really low, you may.

Isn't the key question "What's the delta between the two readings?"

Doesn't one need to measure in the clusters (not just anywhere
in the hives!) AND in the building to get a real picture of what
is happening?

Correct me if I'm forgetting something here, but we've got
bee clusters that may be desiccating on the outer shell,
eating up stores like no tomorrow, and hyperventilating
to try and keep the RH where they want it.

Bees try to control humidity, and we don't want to "stress"
them by challenging them with too high or too low a humidity.
If the difference between the hives and the building is high,
this would mean that the bees are forced to "work to control"
their environment, which means that they must burn "fuel" to
do so.

Now, I have no idea what is considered "optimal RH" in
either a winter cluster or a brood-rearing environment,
but I'd suspect that if hive ventilation was adequate,
and air circulation within the building was adequate, we
would want to run the humidity in the building slightly
below what is considered "optimal" to end up with "optimal"
conditions in the clusters.

The bees' normal metabolic processes must raise the humidity
slightly within the cluster, so one would not want to run the
building environment at the setting that would be "optimal"
for the bees.  One would want to run the building lower.

Same thing for temperature.  If you want the bees to
stay clustered, the temperature of the building may
have to be kept slightly lower than one might think,
as the building has thermal mass, and may tend to
"collect" heat during the day and radiate it at night.

As a disclaimer, I do not keep bees indoors.  I have dealt
with unruly greenhouses, bakeries, and auditoriums, all which
create unique and sometimes extreme environments, and need to
be controlled.  Living things, whether bees, plants, or people,
are generators of heat and moisture via "respiration" machinery,
whether beehives or racks of servers, have the ability to produce
and vent certain minimum and maximum amounts of heat and moisture.
(If you don't think that machines can generate moisture, you have
yet to see a steam-injection oven in a bakery.)

Checking the humidifier stats here at Farmageddon, it used about 50
gallons of water in the last 24 hours to keep its own internal sensor
at 40% RH, and thereby keep a 2800 sq foot house at somewhere around 30%.
It takes a LOT of water to keep the humidity up when the heating system
(baseboard hot water radiators) is "burning" water out of the air.

If we had thrown a party this weekend, it would have used less water.


                jim  (Who has a too-low Relative Humility)

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