Michael,
	I realize this was directed at Bob, however I feel ok with
chiming in. In the early winter or late fall depending on your area,
your bees will slow down in brooding. The space left free of brood will
get filled in either with new forage if there is any in your area, or
moving of stores from up to down. The queen while still laying less,
will continue laying. Sometimes what can happen is that bees will start
to fill the gaps in the center of the nest with pollen and honey. This
leave two smaller micro clusters which if cold weather sets in earlier
than expected by the bees can cause then to tighten up around the brood.
If the brood core is split even slightly, then they get stuck on either
side of the middle stores and can't really get together again without
sacrificing one side of the nest, which they generally won't do. What to
do in this situation is to move the middle frames of partial storage to
the sides, so that the cores can be brought together as one core, moving
the partials to the sides where they would be normally if the core
didn't get split earlier on before the bees had time to get back
together. Given time they will get back together if possible, with one
split getting reduced whlie the other side strengthens, but this doesn't
always happen.

However as Dee and Bob pointed out, this won't happen as often with bees
that have been acclimatized. Its good to see both Dee and Bob on the
same page here, because it reinforces that acclimatization is in fact
something observed by more than one well experienced beekeeper.



--
Scot Mc Pherson
The Mc Pherson Family Honey Farms
Davenport, Iowa USA

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