Hot Bees

 July 23, 2022

How do you stay cool when the temperature is hovering around 90 degrees with 73 % humidity? Some of us stay indoors with the air conditioning; some take to the beach hoping there will be a breeze coming off the water. We don’t have air conditioning in our house, so we depend on our furnace’s fan pumping cooler air from the basement through the house. Combined with the cooling effect of the huge fir trees out front, our home is usually pretty comfortable even in the warmest weather.

Imagine living in a high rise with very little ventilation and no artificial cooling. It wouldn’t take long before you’d be heading outdoors to get away from the stifling heat. That’s exactly what I witnessed today, only it wasn’t people in a high rise; it was my bees. It is imperative that they keep the brood inside the hive between 94-96 degrees to protect the brood. If the temperature rises above this tiny window, the colony dies. 

Any living creature generates heat from its metabolism, and bees are no exception. Crowd tens of thousands of them together without adequate ventilation, and they die. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I bought a nuc—five frames of bees and brood in a box—to install in a new hive, but left it too long. The last nuc I bought I left overnight to settle down. They were fine. This one overheated, and by the time I got to it in the evening, they had plugged up the screened exit trying to get out. The entire colony died; $175 down the drain.

My bees today were too hot inside the hive, so they “bearded,” ie, they hung outside the entry cooling off and cooling the hive inside by reducing the number of little bodies giving off heat. By morning, they should be back inside; hopefully the local skunks won’t discover them overnight. Bees are a favorite treat, and right now the smorgasbord is out. 

I am always amazed at these tiny creatures. The variety of life testifies to me of a God of infinite imagination; everything from sea slugs and anemones to bees and birds and buffalo, they bear witness to an amazing God who provides each kind with an innate knowledge of how to survive in this incredible world he created. 

Taking things a step further, I am humbled by how God has provided for my eternal life by the gift of his Son who died on a cross in my place, for my sins. The God who put inside the bee the instinct to beard on a hot day did even more for us. Our instinct has been corrupted by sin, so he contradicted my instinct to provide what I could never do on my own—deliverance from the corruption and guilt of the sin towards which I innately gravitate; all through faith in his Son Jesus Christ.