Join us for live streams of the bee hive entrances on the family farm here in the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee.
We’re broadcasting the comings and goings at the hive entrances between 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Central Time, Tuesdays through Saturdays (weather and conditions permitting).
You’ll see foragers returning with pollen and nectar, orientation flights, and the steady daily rhythm of the colonies.
Watch live on our YouTube Channel.
Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and spend a little time with the bees.
What to learn more about our bee house and support the research?
Get The Tennessee Bee House: Controlled Environment Apiculture in Tennessee book on Amazon. Available for Kindle or paperback.
From The Tennessee Bee House book narrative: There is a civil engineering concept that establishes the perfect circumstances in time to perform any task. The perfect-day approach allows technicians to target a perfect scenario and time schedule to optimize the desired results. Once the perfect day—”8 hours” of the task at hand—exists, the implementation can be inserted into a 24-hour day, 1 of 365. Example: a perfect day for pouring concrete is above 50° and 72°F with low humidity. The ready-mix industry challenges anything below 40° and above 90° as compromising cure times. Most ready-mix folks claim that in middle TN there are 100 perfect days. It is not uncommon for contractors adjust their pour times to optimize the temperatures and humidities with in a 24-hour day. Buildings, bridges, pilings, pillars are often poured at night to stay with in perimeters to meet strength of mix designs.
The ideal day for bees is when the temperature is 72°F to 80°F. Below 50°F, flight muscles seize up; above 90°F, bees switch from gathering nectar to gathering water to cool down the hive. Wind should remain under 10 mph. High winds drain a bee’s tiny energy reserves and throw off its flight path. Bees use polarized sunlight as their primary GPS navigation system. Raindrops and heavy fog can physically ground or damage a foraging bee. We have all read this.
Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau has an average of 60 to 75 perfect foraging days per year. The concept of 8 hours of perfect circumstances in a human’s mind for a task is manipulated by the forager bees choosing their perfect day. Starting at daylight and ending at sunset, bees use their daytime based on perfection for their situation at hand stretching the number of perfect days into segments. Tennessee has a long, warm spring season, but summer introduces a major hurdle with extreme heat and high humidity. In late spring (April to June), Tennessee bees experience absolute paradise during the peak Tulip Poplar and Sourwood blooms. In July and August, the heat spikes past 90°F with stifling humidity, and the day is no longer “perfect.” Bees are forced to stop gathering nectar and spend hours managing and regulating internal hive conditions temperatures, humidity, and CO2 levels.
Slovenia has an average of 40 to 50 perfect foraging days per year. Slovenia features a shorter, crisper, and highly compressed mountain spring and summer climate. Because of the shorter alpine summers, Slovenia has fewer perfect calendar days, but its native Carniolan honey bees have adapted beautifully. They are highly efficient, exploding in population size exactly as the brief forest honeydew and meadow flows hit. They fly in cooler, greyer weather than other species of honey bees, maximizing those 50 perfect summer days to stack heavy winter honey reserves in record time. Comparison between Slovenia produces drastically more honey than Tennessee, averaging 2.8M to 5.5M lbs., compared to Tennessee’s 350,000 to 500,000 lbs. per year. Tennessee averages, about 55lb. per colony per year, as per USDA. Slovenia averages 45lb. percolony per year both with 4 to 6 months of production. Tennessee has 20000 estimated active colonies, Slovenia has 200,000.