I have been wintering hives in Alberta for about 40 years, and I have some 
thoughts about the starvation/freezing situation. When we started 
overwintering hives, I made up a system consisting of pulling 5 hives 
together in a row and wrapping them with one inch Styrofoam sheets. 
Initially I gave no top entrances and had no success. I made some insulating 
inner covers with 3/8 x 2 inch notches and the wintering improved 
considerably. The next and final improvement came with feeding them as much 
heavy sugar syrup as they would take in late August and September.

Since then, the wintering has been less and less successful, which I 
attribute to the assortment of tracheal mites, varroa mites, nosema etc. 
which have been stressing them since then.  The last few years have been 
quite unsuccessful with over 50% losses. Allen Dick has written on this list 
about his use of augur holes as entrances, and since his wintering has been 
obviously better than mine, I tried some last year.

The results were considerately better than the hives with the old entrances 
right at the top. I was able to split almost all of the auger hole hives and 
only about a third of the ones with the old entrances.  The bees occupied 
most of the space above the auger holes, the ones with the top entrances 
were all right at the top -- many dead of starvation/freezing.

It seems that the auger hole does two things: It leaves a 6" space at top 
which is only ventilated by diffusion. This space can be kept warm and 
humid. It also eliminates the chance of wind blowing directly into the box - 
the end bars of the frames break the force of the wind.

Another observation of interest is that the hives in a row is not an ideal 
arrangement. The clusters all try to move to the side of the box that is 
warmed by the cluster next door. This puts it close to the side of the box 
and means that it can only get food in a semicircle instead of a full 
circle. Most dead clusters are found at the edge of the box. I don't know 
whether they are trying to get close to the warm cluster next door or are 
trying to get away from the cold air from the entrance notch.


                                    Best regards

                                    Donald Aitken 

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