Which do you think is best having double nucs side by side or insulating the nuc?
Insulation only slows down hear transfer not stop it. If you were out side in frigid weather would you rather have a light jacket or have a nice warm fire. The 2 nucs will bee up against the center board during the cold weather. It would also be good to add top insulation.
Jim
The transfer of warmth between two side-by-side nucs only works if you have a relatively thin divider between them, as can occur with a divided brood box.
With 2x stand-alone nuc boxes side-by-side it's a different scenario, as there will be something like 44mm of wood (with British National boxes) between the two colonies.
However, what will be created is a situation for each nuc in which only 3 sides of each box are exposed to the environment, with the fourth being well protected. So - it's not so much a transfer of warmth that occurs, but a reduced heat loss from that one side.
Michael Palmer is perhaps the best-known of those beekeepers who employ side-by-side pairs of nucs - and he once commented that on one occasion he set-up his familiar 'divided brood box with pairs of nucs over', but only installed a colony into one half of the stack. He reported that the colony involved survived and performed identically to those which had been installed as pairs of colonies - thus suggesting that it is the protection that each half of the stack provides for the other which is the key feature of the technique, rather than the commonly held view of 'shared warmth' between them.
As to the 'either/or' question - I'd say insulation is the most important - with that insulation being provided by as many bees as possible.
LJ
My answer is both.
I have had good luck wintering all my nucs side by side covered by 1" insulation board. I have a feeder shim with a interior foam board on top. I winter in rows of up to 8 nucs per bench. It saves time and insulation board to run them in this manner. I suppose there is some transfer of heat value as well, but I am no expert. Having said that, the nucs on the ends do not do as well as the middle nucs.
I winter nucs in 2 deep or 3 medium.
... and then there's the set-up favoured by some beekeepers in which 2x half-sized or 4x quarter-sized nuc boxes are placed over an occupied full-sized hive, both in order to build-up and, in some cases, over-winter. There you have a very definite transfer of heat upwards to help support the much smaller nucleus colonies.
With larger nucleus colonies there is far less need for such assistance, and so - as with all beekeeping matters - it is rarely a definitive case of one thing or the other.
LJ
Palmer also says they do share warmth and create one cluster that spans the two spaces.
He does indeed. The observation of clustering in what becomes 'the central area' between two half-boxes was first made by Kirk Webster - who presumably assumed that it was due to shared warmth, with that assumption appearing to have persisted.
But, consider: during winter - when this clustering becomes of importance - the bees will have risen from the divided brood box up into the nuc-box pairs, where it is both warmer and where their stores are located.
The inner sides of the nuc box pairs are never precision-made, nor are they normally strapped together tightly - so in practice, they will be touching each other only at the occasional high points of their surfaces - with the remaining area being an air-gap of perhaps a millimetre or so. This air-gap, together with the two wall thicknesses betwen the colonies presents an extremely poor route for heat conduction.
Which is why I think it's far more likely that it's the modest protection from the elements that each inner wall affords the other which renders these walls 'less cold' than the others, which then duly presents an attractive surface to the bees, and why they choose to cluster against them.
It would be interesting to hear what Derek has to say about this, as the physics of heat transfer is one of his specialities.
LJ
Quote from: little john on June 03, 2017, 06:00:46 AM
The transfer of warmth between two side-by-side nucs only works if you have a relatively thin divider between them, as can occur with a divided brood box.
LJ
LJ I am sorry but your science is wrong. There is no transfer of heat regardless of how thick (within reason) the division board is because the relative temperature of each cluster is the same. This assumes there is not a drastic difference in cluster size. What the two nucs gain is just that, the common wall has no heat loss like it would if the boxes were separated. Basically each nuc conserves stores by not having that heat loss on the common wall.
No, it's not my science which is 'wrong' - it's that we're talking about two quite different scenarios.
You say "the relative temperature of each cluster is the same" - but I didn't mention clustering once within that post. Bees form clusters when they are cold, and they are far more likely to be doing this higher up within the nuc-box pairs during winter, rather than down in the divided brood box during warmer weather.
Should - for example - the divided brood box be positioned such that one half faces South, and the other North, then there will be a marked temperature gradient across those two half-boxes during the day, regardless of the size of the nucleus colonies within them.
There will then indeed be a flow, or net transfer of heat from one half of the box to the other, provided that the divider is reasonably thin, and thus allows this. With nuc-box pairs placed overhead, such a thermal flow won't be as marked as if they were absent, granted, but it will still occur.
It might be beneficial perhaps, if you were to take my posts 'as a whole' rather than simply clip-out one line to take issue with, for the line in question was merely a preamble to the subject of claimed 'shared warmth' across pairs of discrete nuc boxes, and not a statement intended for rigorous analysis.
LJ
Quote from: little john on June 07, 2017, 11:06:15 AM
Should - for example - the divided brood box be positioned such that one half faces South, and the other North, then there will be a marked temperature gradient across those two half-boxes during the day, regardless of the size of the nucleus colonies within them.
A ventilated hive will have very little difference in air temperature between the north face and the south face if you don't paint the hive black. My hives face south and yet the cluster favors the north wall. The south having more ventilation than the north because of the entrance. There is not a big heat gain from the sun on a white box in the winter. Secondly, no matter what color it is it gets covered with snow. If you don't have a cold winter and snow then I can't see it making any difference whether the nucs were together or not even though they probably will cluster on a common wall.
Quote from: Acebird on June 07, 2017, 01:29:28 PM
Quote from: little john on June 07, 2017, 11:06:15 AM
Should - for example - the divided brood box be positioned such that one half faces South, and the other North, then there will be a marked temperature gradient across those two half-boxes during the day, regardless of the size of the nucleus colonies within them.
A ventilated hive will have very little difference in air temperature between the north face and the south face if you don't paint the hive black.
That's known as moving the goal-posts.
I am currently running two quad-nuc long hives, painted dove-grey, fitted with 3.0 mm polycarbonate dividers. These have been run now for two years as test-beds with a view to making several more of these, and thus standardising on the format.
As these boxes contain small, 5-frame nucleus colonies, they do NOT have the normal Open Mesh Floor ventilation provided here on the majority of full-sized hives.
During trials, a noticeable temperature difference was recorded within cavities facing North and those facing South, to such a degree that I have re-adjusted the orientation of these Long Hives in order that one of their long sides (and thus the end panels of all four nuc partitions) now faces due South - specifically to ensure that temperature differences between the four cavities from solar radiation (throughout the year) will be minimised.
(http://i67.tinypic.com/25jxxxx.jpg)
LJ
Ok reading this thread is quite interesting. Last winter I put my nucs in a greenhouse. I didn't have any shelves in it at the time so I just placed them around the edges. Now I have shelves. I plan to put them all as tight together as I can this winter and use a Styrofoam board across the top. We will see how it works...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk
Hi Eric - this is interesting, because the use of greenhouses is normally discouraged in view of the heat which can be generated inside them during sunny days in winter, which would send out a false message that the weather is warm enough to take clearance flights - and yet you've done this - presumably successfully, else you wouldn't be continuing with the idea ...
Have you modified the greenhouse in any significant way - solar shielding, for example - with shade netting or painting the roof glass ?
I've got a couple of small domestic-sized greenhouses which have been empty for years, and I've often toyed with the idea of stacking nucs inside them over winter, but never have - precisely because of the solar heating issue - and converting them into small 'sheds' by removing the glass and cladding them with plywood or similar doesn't make too much economic sense ... and so they remain unused.
Any tips ?
LJ
I started last summer with 2 nucs. I went into winter with 5 nucs and 2 hives. I came out of the winter with 2 nucs. Both were in the greenhouse. One of the nucs I didn't expect to make it but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I left the door open when I thought it would be warm for cleansing flights... In the spring I had some serious cleaning but it was easy washing. Bees go to the bathroom a lot in the winter... I did have a 3 foot snow storm that collapsed one roof panel... It landed on one of the survivors. I was to busy plowing to knock the snow off of it... I agree that to some extent I might have lost some because of temperature confusion. I think I might have lost them anyway if they were outside. One of the outside hives was really strong going into winter. I almost took more honey from it. It died anyway and it had plenty of stores. None of them died from starvation.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk
Quote from: little john on June 07, 2017, 07:14:38 AM
Which is why I think it's far more likely that it's the modest protection from the elements that each inner wall affords the other which renders these walls 'less cold' than the others, which then duly presents an attractive surface to the bees, and why they choose to cluster against them.
One way to find out is to place multiple ones together and bees only in some. Perhaps with one of your long hives, leave bees out of one of the middle partitions, and see where the bees cluster on the adjacent sides. This would need more than one replication.