Honeybees cluster together when it’s cold – but we’ve been completely wrong about why

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 Quote: However, my study found cluster mantles act more like a heatsink, decreasing insulation. Clustering is not a wrapping of a thick blanket to keep warm, but more like a desperate struggle to crowd closer to the “fire” or die. The only upside is that the mantle helps keep the bees near the outside alive.


As the temperature outside the hive falls, bees around the mantle go into hypothermic shutdown and stop producing heat. The mantle compresses as the bees try to stay above 10°C.


The mantle bees getting closer together increases the thermal conductivity between them and decreases the insulation. Heat will always try to move from a warmer region to a colder one. The rate of heat flow from the core bees to the mantle bees increases, keeping those bees on the outside of the mantle at 10°C (hopefully).


Think of a down jacket – it’s the air gap between the feathers that help keeps the wearer warm. Honeybee clusters are similar to the action of compressing a down jacket, whereby the thermal conductivity eventually increases to that of a dense solid of feathers, more like a leather jacket.


In contrast, when penguins are huddling in the Antarctic winter, they all keep their body core hot at similar temperatures, and therefore there is little or no heat transfer between the penguins. Unlike the bees in the mantle, there aren’t any penguins in a hypothermic shutdown.

Link to article


Another article that does a nice job of summing up the above i.e. hives need more insulation:

Link to Article

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