“I gather you do not wrap your hives.”

Correct.  I did for a few years when I first started, but came to the conclusion (probably erroneously), that the black surface warmed the hives too much on the clear, sunny-but-cold, mid-winter days we have (or used to have) around here, and the bees would be ‘fooled’ into thinking it was warmer outside than it was, go out for cleansing flights and not make it back.  Now, when I see them flying from these uncovered hives with temps in the 20’sF/<0C, I wonder if they would have done it, anyway.

But, in the past 10+ years that I haven’t covered them, this is the first time I have seen this happen to every hive.  And, this winter was milder than the last one (lowest temp: -5F/-21C vs. –16F/-27C, and avg. temp warmer).  And, this spring was the earliest I have ever seen them start bringing in pollen: 15 March (only the survivors, all of the ones that starved were gone by then).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I may try wrapping half of the hives and see if there is a difference.  Being a pack rat, I still have the roofing felt from over a decade ago.  Good thing I’m not married.


“I did not ask when you did your last brood chamber manipulations and what they were.  One guaranteed method to kill hives or reduce wintering success is to rearrange their stores for them too late in the season for them to fix your meddling after you are done.  <snip>. I am quite reluctant to mess with brood chambers after August in short seasons and September in a long fall.  <snip>

Nobody can arrange a hive for wintering better than the bees do.”

Great question.  Other than opening the inner cover to look inside, I did not muck around inside the hives after mid-August.  In general, I try to minimize my intrusions into the hives in order to disturb the bees as little as possible.  For example, I do not swap brood boxes in the spring.  Did in the beginning, then didn’t one year and found that the bees naturally moved the queen back down the stack as honey was produced.  Since then, whenever possible, I leave them to make their own arrangements and manipulations.  I do a compete clean-up down to the bottom board in the spring, but put the boxes back in the same order and the frames back in the same order in the boxes.  With three deeps, I have not seen problems with the bees getting ‘stuck’ up top.  This year is an extreme example: the surviving clusters were all on the top frames of the top deeps, but have moved down on their own and are now raising brood in the bottom two deeps.  To paraphrase your statement, nobody can arrange a hive better than the bees.

I hope it is something as simple as wrapping.  I’d love to determine the most probable cause and a solution.  That’s an easy one.

###################################
Bill
Claremont, NH
+43.35687 +43° 21’ 25”
-72.3835   -72° 23’ 01”
CWOP: D5065
Weather Underground: KNHCLARE3
HonetBeeNet: NH001

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