June Symposium "Facts & Fiction of Honeybees & Insulation" w/ Dr. Derek Mitchell

OUR JUNE SYMPOSIUM with Dr Derek Mitchell

"Facts and Fiction of Honeybees and Insulation"
For the last 110 years beekeepers and bee related academics have had serious misconceptions about heat flow in honeybee nests which has led to serious consequences for honey bees.

MEET Dr Derek Mitchell :
Dr. Mitchell researches into the heat transfer of man-made and natural honeybee nests at the School of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Leeds where he recently completed his Phd with a thesis entitled “The Thermofluid engineering of the honeybee nest (Apis Mellifera) . He has had articles published in Beecraft, Bee Culture, American Bee Journal and Natural Honey bee husbandry in addition to his published academic work in the Royal Society Journal and International Journal of Biometeorology .

Derek’s curiosity about this area of honey bees and heat started when Elaine, his wife, bought their first hive in 2010 and his physics and engineering training, told him what they had been told about honey bees and the hives wasn’t the complete story. This curiosity has resulted in his ground breaking and often controversial research into honey bees. Some of which has been cited by Prof. Thomas D. Seeley, the foremost authority on honey bee ecology, as the “Best source of information on about the differences in insulation value between tree cavities and standard wooden hives and about the effects of these differences on the energetics of colony thermoregulation”.