The Beekeepers Club Inc.

Climate-controlled beehives (by Dietmar Klimkeit)
An amazing fact about bees is that they control temperature and humidity in their hive - climate controlled beehives.

Bees keep a constant brood nest temperature around 35°C, otherwise the brood won't develop properly. Bees cool their hive by fanning air through the hive with their wings and evaporating water. Bees heat their hive by generating heat with their body. Bees can generate a temperature of over 43°C with their wing muscles whilst immobilising themselves in a comb cell, so called heater cells - Honey serves as fuel.

A bee colony not only controls the temperature inside the brood nest but also the humidity, which is maintained at approximately 50% - in other words a beehive is climate-controlled by the bees.

Graeme Lunt, one of our club members from Coburg, has set-up one of his beehives with temperature and humidity monitoring sensors and produces daily graphs as shown below.

You can view today's actual graph on-line by following this link or with a click on the picture below.

Heater Bees
The knowledge about heater bees is fairly recent and was discovered by Professor Jürgen Tautz, at Würzburg University, in Germany.

It has been published in the book The Buzz about Bees - (Book review by Rebecca Leaman) - this book states that the body temperature of heater bees can be over 43°C (page 209)

Since then various articles have been published, most reporting that heater bees can heat their body up to a temperature of 44°C.

Here some of the articles:

The Secret of Hive Temperature Control: Heater Bees - Central Beekeepers Alliance (March 2010)

Honey bees secret world of heat revealed - The Telegraph (March 2010)

Secret life of bees reveals inner glow - Sydney Morning Herald (27th March 2010)

The honey bees with built-in central heating - Daily Mail UK - (15th March 2010)






Bee Vision and Heater Bees - Video clip on You Tube