I view hive deaths as summer versus winter.  Back before varroa I seldom ever lost a hive in winter.  I estimate maybe 5% at most and probably less.  My winter prep has always been minimal.  I make sure the top brood box is full of honey.  I am generally done doing that by Sept 1.   I stack the empty honey supers on top for storage.  Put an inner cover on top of that with the slot down.  And, I put some kind of blockage in the bottom entrance to keep mice out.  That is 100% of my winter prep.  No wraps, no insulation.  Before mites my hives were in an opening in my woods so got a lot of direct sun and I painted them white.  After 50 years of concentrated and dedicated total neglect that spot is now forest so direct sun is a lot less.  So, I painted all my hives the darkest green the local big box store mixes.  Today my winter hive deaths are about 5% if I do a good job of killing varroa mites.  If I do not do such a good job winter deaths can be as high as 90%.  My  winters most years have at least one night that goes to neg 10 deg.  The all time low in 50 years was neg 28 deg if I remember right.  A few miles east claimed neg 35 that night.  Total snow ranges from a low of 50 inches to over 150 inches.  As far as I am concerned winter deaths are up to me.  If I do my job killing mites the bees are perfectly capable of doing their job of staying warm.  In all the years I have kept bees I have only had one hive starve over winter.  Most winter deaths happen in late Feb to mid April.  It is very unusual for me to see a death before or after those dates.

Then there are summer deaths.  Hives that swarm and end up queenless.  Or with a queen who rapidly turns into a drone layer.  Hives that get robbed.  Hives where I killed the queen and did not know it.  Hives that get EFB and I did not catch until they were not worth saving anymore.  Hives that get attacked by European Hornets and end up dead.  And who knows what else goes wrong in summer.  The list seems rather long.  I always seem to do a good enough job killing mites that they do not crash from mites in summer.  They never seem to starve in summer.  I have not yet had any freeze in summer.  But, I have not had any freeze in winter either.
    We talk and talk about how to winter our bees.  My opinion is the bees are perfectly capable of dealing with winter without any big prep on my part.  If the ones in trees survive surely the ones in my hives can make it just fine.  But, there is a key.  I need really low mite levels August 1 and all the way thru fall.  Those winter bees need to be as close to virus free as possible.  That means a mite count down around 1% at worst August 1 and if a sudden jump in mites happens somehow hammer them fast with something really effective at killing mites.  The usual treatments of a couple of grams of oxalic vapor will not cut it in the fall.
    Now could I cut those summer deaths?  Sure I could.  Most of those are my choice.  The choice is can I raise a new hive easier than I can save the sick hive?  The normal answer is it is easier to raise a new one so I just do not try very hard to save hives in trouble during the summer.  Take the hive that swarmed and after swarmed and failed to get a new queen.  It is about a total waste to give them brood to raise a new queen.  That takes too long in my short summer.  I live in NE Ohio, not Alabama.  I could give them a five frame nuc with a laying queen.  Should I risk doing such a move when I could simply split that same nuc in the spring and get my dead hive back and still have the nuc to sell in six weeks.  How about those drone layers.  The hive is generally weak by that point, demoralized and I might be willing to give them one frame of open brood and my experience is one time in ten or fifteen that fixes the problem.  But, if it is after early July I have to then dump so much brood and feed into that hive to get it to wintering status it is not worth saving.  Of course all these problems can be solved by buying a new mated queen.  That gets expensive real fast.  I am too cheap to spend the money.  The bottom line is I likely average 25% deaths in summer.  It is so easy to replace that many it simply is not worth much effort to save them.
    Dick



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