The story is not a very adequate representation of the situation.  Reporters 
rarely seem to get it right.  Maybe I am really, really bad at expressing 
myself.
Here is the story in my words:

Normally I am running 2500 to over 3000 hives and in the fall harvest maybe 
100 to 140 drums of honey and then feed about 50 tonne of syrup.  So PEI is 
not great bee pasture, and or my management sucks, but I usually feed more 
than I harvest.  It suffices to make me a living, as pollination is my main 
income, and I pack most of my honey.

Last fall I broke my heel bone.  I was in a cast from August 30 to December 
and it is still a problem.  I am presently in the middle of moving into 
blueberries and last night I was cursing as I was working on rough ground in 
the dark and it twisted several times.

So last fall I had to decide how to deal with the injury and decided the 
best thing would be just to leave almost all the honey.  My crew was green 
and and I was afraid of taking much without my being with them.   They are a 
good crew, but I do rely a lot in fall on just the lifting the back of the 
hives to gauge their weight and it takes experience to know how heavy they 
have to be.  In the end, my fears were justified, because although they 
harvested only about  15 drums of honey,  and fed about 18 tonne of syrup it 
was not enough for the unsplit hives.  It is those hives which starved, not 
the splits.   They had plenty of winter bees,  too many in fact for their 
stores.
From the few yards where they did harvest honey, the bees were left in three 
boxes often, but the third box had a lot of brood not stores and they should 
have been massively fed.

Over the years there has often been discussion of the list about the 
relative virtues of wintering on syrup or honey.  I would note from this 
unwanted experiment:
1.  The bees appeared to suffer in the spring from the fact that most of 
honey was granulated hard in the frames.
2.  Bees take down syrup in the fall so quickly that it is easy to discount 
the toll it takes on them.  But maybe it is an advantage to work some of 
those older bees to death early on.

The nucs and splits were a different story.  I had very poor success with 
them, but very few starved.  With them, low population seemed to be the 
factor.  I had tried a new method of overwintering on about 400 nucs in a 
styrofoam lobster shipping container than held eight deep frames.  The 
splits were made late and suffered from the record rainfall in August.  I 
usually stop splitting at the end of July.  The coolers had two one inch (25 
mm) holes but they did not react like wooden hives in snow and melt a cave 
around them.  So for a little while they had entrances buried in snow and 
dampness was an issue.  But earlier in August made nucs in wooden boxes also 
did poorly.  I was using queen cells because I wanted to introduce some new 
genetics and we are closed to importation of queens from tracheal mite 
areas, which includes all Russian stock.  But one thing in common with all 
the nucs and late splits was they had low populations and lots of honey. 
The survivors all required boosting with bees in the spring, and now they 
seem to be turning around.  On the other hand,  I am still finding the odd 
yard with quite a few hives going back from nosema.  However, the majority 
of the hives have responded to a nice fruit bloom which is on presently and 
there are lots of strong booming hives to work with.

After culling and uniting, we were down to about half of 2700 hives and nucs 
put into winter.  With making up some new hives over the last month we are 
moving 1600 into blueberries.

Would love to move down south with my hives, but that is not an option. 
Just moving the beekeeper way south to Chile didn't help those styrofoam 
nucs much that got buried in snow.   But anyway,  I know that I am addicted 
to bees and I will probably just keep at it, for as long as I can continue 
to afford to pay for my habit and limp around the fields.   Got to go,  fuel 
up the stomach and the trucks and move another 360 hives tonight.

Stan 

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