Anchorage hobbyist beekeeper working to find better ways to keep bees warm in winter
With the winter weather quickly approaching, Anchorage hobbyist beekeeper Tim Huffman has been developing an insulation system for his polystyrene bee hive for the past few years in an attempt to keep his bees alive through the winter months.
“Bees create their own heat,” Huffman explained. “They vibrate their flight muscles, which creates friction, which creates heat. And they’ll keep the inside of the hive 70 degrees all winter long.
“My job is to give them the kind of setup that preserves that heat — that involves extra insulation.”
The insulation set-up includes taping all the seams of the containers holding the bees and using materials with insulating properties, like polystyrene, to help capture all the heat the bees are generating and keep it inside the hive.
“We taped all of the seams — those are the thinnest points, so that’ll help preserve heat that way — and we added a candy board, which is emergency food for winter, in case they run out of honey, that I’ll put sugar in later, and then we added extra insulation above the candy boards,” Huffman said.
This past winter, he said that the system was a success after all his colonies survived, which allowed Huffman to practice more sustainable beekeeping.
Huffman said bees do not typically survive the cold weather during the winter months
“It is a myth that it’s hard to get them through. It’s actually formulaic,” he said. “If you use the right methods and the right gear, you’re going to get your bees through the winter.”
Huffman has been documenting his progress and his beekeeping journey in Alaska on his YouTube channel. He hopes between that and offering free beekeeping courses to the public, this can help encourage people to harvest bees more sustainably. His next classes will start up again in the early winter. Huffman is also in the process of organizing a Sustainable Beekeeping conference on Feb. 8th at 49th State Brewing.
“It’s disrespectful to these amazing insects to keep them for the summer and kill them in the fall after you’ve got your honey,” Huffman said. “If we have something that can perpetuate itself, like these colonies of bees, then why kill them and start over again every year?”
Looking ahead to the upcoming winter, Huffman is changing up his design to provide additional insulation.
“I changed the candy board a little bit,” Huffman said. “Reducing the space did two things: It reduced the amount of sugar I had to put in there, but it also let me squeeze a little extra insulation above the candy board.”
