My bees are hot. Not the normal kind of summer hot. The kind of hot where you start doing math on how much longer they can hold out.
We are 24 days into a stretch of temperatures above 100 degrees, with another 10 days of it in the forecast. Summers always get hot in North Texas, but this heatwave is extreme. My hives sit in full sun, which is where they are supposed to be for most of the year, with a hill behind them that blocks the wind. In winter that windbreak is going to be a gift. Right now, it means there is no breeze reaching them, and full sun with no airflow and no break from the heat is a hard place to be a bee.
Bees work incredibly hard to keep their brood nest at a stable temperature, right around 95 degrees. That is not a rough target. Healthy brood needs to stay in a narrow band close to that number, and the bees hold it there no matter what the weather outside is doing. So when it is 104 degrees in full sun with no breeze, they are not just a little warm. They are fighting to pull the inside of that hive down to 95 and hold it there, and the further the outside climbs from where they need to be, the harder that fight gets. When it gets too hot they stop doing the things that keep a colony growing and pour their energy into cooling instead, fanning their wings and hauling water and running the air conditioning by hand. That is energy they are not spending on raising brood or building stores. When my mentor came out to inspect with me, we found low larva counts across the board. One hive had swarmed and left me with half a colony and no brood. Another had a queen but very little activity. The third was doing better but still running below where it should be. He called me afterward to say that when he got back to his own property later that day, even though the temperature reading was higher, it was noticeably cooler there than it had been at mine. My placement was working against me in exactly the conditions where the bees needed the most help.
So we went looking for a way to give them some relief without tearing up a hive placement that works the rest of the year.
There is a rule of thumb in beekeeping about moving hives, the two feet or two miles idea. You either shift them a few feet at a time so they can reorient gradually, or you move them far enough away that they completely reset their internal map before bringing them back. Moving the hives was on the table. But the placement itself is good for ten months out of the year. The issue was never the location. The issue was the sun during a freak stretch of heat. So instead of relocating the bees, we decided to bring them shade.
Around here, we keep things when we are done with them because you never know when they will earn a second life. We had shade cloth left over from our back patio, from before we put up a pergola. We always have lumber on the property. So, we built a simple temporary structure to hold the shade cloth over the apiary. It took 30 minutes to make and 30 more minutes to install the next day. Time well spent (and I bet the bees agree).
I went out to check it today and the temperature under the cloth is significantly cooler. Now it doesn't look pretty, and that bugs me more than I would like to admit. We had to add some bracing to keep it from tipping, so it is not winning any awards for appearance. But right now, I am not going for pretty. I am going for keeping my bees alive, and on that measure, it is doing its job.
The best part is that none of it is permanent. When the heat breaks and the bees no longer need the shade, the whole thing comes down easily and stores without taking up much room. And I already know it will find other work. Shade over a garden bed, cover for something else that needs it. The materials were useful before this and they will be useful after. This is just their current assignment.
I put the shade up to cool the hives down, and right now it is doing that. The temperature under the cloth is lower, the bees have a break from the direct sun, and I did not have to give up a placement that works the rest of the year to get there. Whether it is enough to help my colonies recover and build back up before the season turns, I cannot tell you yet. That part is out of my hands. But I would rather give them a fighting chance than stand around watching them struggle, and this was the fastest way I had to do that.
From The Field: When the conditions change, you change with them. The bees do not care about the plan, only whether they can survive it.