> Last year was the coldest winter remembered
> here and only colonies with 6 or more seams
> of bees, at oxalic time, survived.
It sounds like you keep some excellent records to know that!
> How does Peter's 18,000 relate to my 5 seams?
He's a little lower than your estimate, but he's a little south of you, too.
A deep frame holds about 6500 to 7000 cells total, so 3250 to 3500 per side.
A bee on comb covers a little over 2 cells of real estate, you can see this
in many photos.
So, assuming solid coverage, 3500 / 2 = 1750 bees per comb face, and double
that to add the bees on the adjacent comb face, 3500 per seam.
3 mediums roughly equal two deeps, so 2/3rds of that would be 2333 bees per
seam
There are sure to be "extras", as there is always space for a 3rd bee to
crawl over a been on one comb without displacing the bee on the adjacent
comb. But it would be very rare to have the entire frame completely
covered, so I'll cancel one out with the other.
So, roughly 21,000 bees for "six seams", in a deep box. 14,000 for mediums.
But last winter was exceptionally long and cold, and created a real no-win
situation for even colonies that had been well-provisioned for winter,
properly monitored, and even fed as their stores ran low. Many bees in the
outer shell of the cluster die over winter of course, and the length of last
winter decreased populations more than in milder, shorter winters past.
There comes a point where the cluster falls below the minimum critical mass
needed to generate the heat to keep the majority of the bees alive. So,
cold spring nights kill off progressively larger numbers of bees each night,
and at some point, there are not enough bees to survive at all.
Feeding did not help these colonies, as the problem was a simple matter of
sheer number of bees that can survive to the early spring.
At least here in the city, where bees are never really subjected to
exceptional extremes of cold, feeding was absolutely required in Jan and
Feb, as the bees ate through their stores more quickly than in prior years,
even though one might have expected them to be clustered more, and consuming
less stores. Rather than doing simulative feeding in March, we were putting
on another candy board, as we did not want to encourage attempts to raise
brood with no sign of warmth in sight.
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