You are certainly asking the right questions, Vickie.  I will try to help
you by providing some observations that you can make yourself as well as
answering some of your questions.
- To determine if you have "enough" honey for the winter, go around to the
back of your hive.  Loosen the top box from the bottom with your hive tool
and try to tip the top box up.  If it is "real heavy", you have enough
honey.  If it is easy to tip, you don't have enough.  I don't know just
where Green Harbor is, but if it on the coast you only need 40 or so pounds
to get through the winter.  40 pounds of honey and 20 pounds of hive
equipment provides a slightly strenuous lift or tip.  If the box is
reasonably full of honey it weighs around 80 pounds, which will appear "real
heavy" when you try to tip it.  Only a little honey will weigh 30-40 pounds,
which will feel real light.
- Seeing the bees in the center is normal, and having frames beside them
full of honey is a real good sign.  I would not tell you to expect the bees
to be in the bottom box, although if they were there it would not be
unusual.  Your bottom box "might" have very little honey in it, and that is
not necessarily bad.  As the end frames in your top box are almost certainly
full of honey, and the bees are in the center with sealed honey on both
sides, it seems as if they have plenty of food for the winter.
- I suggest you just leave the bees alone and not try to move honey frames
into the center.  The bees will move as they need the honey.
- How many bees will fly on a warm day in mid-winter is a function of the
queen and their food.  I have had years where I was convinced a hive was
dead because there was no flight when other hives were real busy, and have
found the hives with no flight to be real strong when spring finally came.
If you can see a good size cluster I would not worry about how many bees are
flying on warm days.
- Do not hesitate to look at a cluster for a few seconds two to three times
in a winter.  Do not keep the cover off longer than a few seconds, and limit
yourself to 2-3 peeks.
- Instead of asking "why not heat hives", I suggest you ask "what is the
benefit of heating hives"?  As far as I have ever read or experienced, cold,
by itself, does not damage honeybees.  Better put, honeybees can cope well
with cold.  However, honeybees cannot cope with (1) excessive moisture or
(2) lack of food.
For example, in the days before mites we would occasionally find spring
hives full of dead bees, but with significant stores of honey.  What had
happened was that severe cold had kept the bees in their cluster, where they
had consumed all their food, so they starved to death.  Food was just inches
away, but they could not break their cluster to get to it so they starved.
 
If you warmed a hive with a light bulb you would encourage the bees to eat
more, and their metabolism would cause moisture which would have to be
dispersed.  Thus, they could run out of food and starve, or the moisture
might not disperse, encouraging growth of mold and bacteria which might harm
the bees.  In fact, experiments involving wintering bees inside in Canada
have demonstrated that the major difficulty in doing so is keeping the
inside of the structure sufficiently cold!  Failure to do so kills the bees!
 
- From what I have read on Bee-L, "plain old vegetable oil" works just fine,
in place of FGMO.  However, it is much more expensive.  A "medium path" is
to melt Crisco.  At a temperature of 150 degrees, a five pound can of Crisco
in an oven will readily liquefy.  Crisco is less expensive than vegetable
oil and easier to find (in small quantities) than FGMO and works just fine
against tracheal mites.
 
Hope this helps, and keep attending those bee club meeting!
Lloyd
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Owner, Ross Rounds(tm), the finest in comb honey production.
http://www.rossrounds.com