Did our towns two day festival. Talked to a high school friend today, settled on a G200 eventually. Standard house install, but the pole barn is going to be interesting, going to be a 36x72 divided into three sections, one is cold storage, a much smaller section will be a hot room for extracting honey. Needs to be kept between 112-115 degrees, may need to go as high as 140 once in awhile if the honey is froze or crystalized. Radiant in the floor should handle the 112-115 but thinking air handlers obviously to get it to 140, definitely will want that one first in the loop. He’s talking a minimum of 12” of insulation in the walls and 24” in the ceiling over and above what the building will already have in the shell.
He’s big into honey and has had paid trips to the east coast and other places to divulge his secrets on his very high over winter survival rates. Really pretty simple, bees are meant to eat honey, sugar water isn’t honey, so don’t take so much honey that they need sugar water in the spring to have enough energy to start gathering pollen to make more honey. Last I heard his survival rates are around 95% which is unheard of with hive mites and colony collapse disorder being a common problem across the country.