Yoon  said: "The Russian medical community, I gather, has been taking
advantage of this
> open secret: a really dead person is a warm dead, not frozen dead.
a really dead person is a warm dead, not frozen dead".    There are also
accounts in the press from time to time of people getting trapped below the
ice on ponds and being thawed out long after they would have drowned if they
had not chilled rapidly.

Yoon has introduced a very interesting possibility concerning the wintering
of small clumps of bees -   Michael Palmer says he winters nucs on 4
standard frames with only 20 pouds of stores, but apparently 2 per box which
form a divided cluster of, presumably, 8 frames and 40 pounds of stores.
The total stores seem light from what the literature says (60 - 80 pounds
needed in North America) , and I am trying to understand why.

Does Yoon's observation imply that as the winter temperature falls, ALL the
bees in small clumps (as opposed to full-size colonies, which maintain an
internal temp of about 30 degrees at which the central bees remain active)
may become chilled and moribund, not killed but suspending the consumption
of stores, until the outside temperature warms again and the bees revive,
re-start metabolism of honey, raise the internal temp right up and start to
raise brood?   If so, does anyone know at what temp a bee's blood freezes?
And how long a chilled/torpid bee can survive before the temp has to rise?
(Nothing in any book I have - we know that bumble bee queens manage to
hibernate all winter, but I myself do not know how long that implies the
inactive period may be able to be).

If this mechanism does work,  it is likely to depend on fairly constant
conditions - if the temp goes up and down in winter, thawing and re-freezing
in warmer winters would surely be difficult.  Have any experiments been done
on placing small nucs in a fridge/freezer in order to produce reliable,
re-producible over-wintering of small nucs ?

Can u winter 4 spare queens using a box with a star-shaped divider, so that
4 mini-nucs can form one central cluster?

Just asking - my freezer is now full of blackberries.

Robin Dartington

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