>I have found that the key for me is controlling winter feed to get good overwintering. Compared to that and Varroa control, everything else is in the noise.

I am not sure anyone is arguing against this point. Sufficient and available stores has always been an indispensable element to successful overwintering and in the varroa era we've added sufficient healthy winter bees as high on the list of overwintering needs.

This discussion began around the question of whether and to what extent tight clustering is of benefit to the colony - and this question (while to date largely underexplored) led into a discussion about the dynamics of clusters in more insulated contexts.

So I do not believe the first principals of overwintering are being questioned - rather, with those elements relatively equal is there a benefit to the colony in insulated versus uninsulated cavities?

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