I have read the many posts on equipment to winter bees and keep them healthy.  I am particularly impressed by Mr Tardif's data collection and modelling efforts.  He may well teach us a lot.  I also think lots of us are falling into a self made trap based  on our ability to do well with wintering the trap being everyone should do it our way.

Lets just digress for a minute.  Have you noticed that the people who succeed in keeping bees treatment free year after year nearly all live in very warm winter climates?  Their bees do well enough in some cases they routinely make honey yields equal or better than the state average where they live.  Yet, over and over you bring those queens into my climate and the mites kill them just as fast as the mites kill any other bee.  That includes queens from well known treatment free commercial queen suppliers.  Put those queens in my hives treatment free and the hive is dead in 12 to 18 months.  Now, I am 100% convinced those who claim to be treatment free often are.  But climate makes a difference in winter survival.

I think exactly the same is true of prepping your hive for winter.  A wet hive is deadly.  But, what you need to do to keep a hive dry varies all over the map depending on temperature and humidity.  Another factor is how often you have a fly day.  Insulate too much and not enough heat gets in the hive from sun shine to warm it to the point the bees fly.  Not flying when it is safely warm outside makes such insulation a negative.  So, I view any claim that says this is the best way to prep your hives for winter as pure BS.  It may well be the best way in Alabama or Ohio or western Washington state.  But, if it is the best way in Alabama it is close to a 100% bet it is not the best way in Ohio or Washington.

Still, there are some general rules regardless of the particulars of your winter.
1.  You need healthy bees and the colder and longer your winter lasts the healthier they need to be.  If you are in Alabama you can tolerate a lot more mites and viruses in August than you can tolerate in Ohio in August.  Still, there is a minimum health required.  I can tell you what it is in NE Ohio.  I am not so sure I can tell you what it is even in central Ohio, much less Alabama.
2.  You need to stop wind from blowing thru the combs.  An open air colony might make it in the south but does not stand much chance above the Mason Dixon line.
3.  You need to keep the inside of the colony fairly dry.  Particularly you do not want condensation on the bottom of whatever is facing the tops of the top frames.  As bees make a lot of metabolic water keeping warm the hive needs some kind of controlled leaks to get rid of this water.  How big this leak needs to be is going to depend on local temperatures and humidity levels.  Some places have humidity levels like a desert in winter.  Most of the US mid west is like this.  Some places have sky high humidity levels such as western Washington. Those differences in humidity are likely going to demand different sizes of leaks and perhaps different leak locations.
4.  You need adequate winter stores so your bees can eat.  But adequate is going to mean totally different things from area to area.  Where
Mr Tardif lives adequate is going to mean well cured and really low ash content.  Quite likely his bees would do better on sugar or HFCS than any kind of natural honey.  Where I live my bees seldom go four weeks all winter without a fly day so just about any honey is ok most winters as dysentery is seldom an issue at all.  Except once in a while we get a winter when the bees do not fly for 60 days or more and those winters the hive fronts are really stained up on the first fly day and those that survive are weak compared to normal.

I think all these ideas were understood 100 years ago.  I also think if anything the internet has set us back.  Today we hop on the internet and ask for expert advise and often do not tell where we live and important factors that need consideration before answering are not listed.  Then an expert gives us an answer and does not tell us those same factors for where he lives.  So, the advise is close to useless.  I have long said that if you ask three bee keepers a question you should expect about five answers.  And all five answers are correct some place some time.

Dick        

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