Winter is a time of rest for the beekeeper, also for the bees. However they do not hibernate. Staying alive through the winter is a cooperative act. The queen must be kept alive at all costs, although she will probably be off lay through the coldest spells.

The workers form a large cluster round her on the nearest honeycombs, pointing their heads inwards and their tails outwards and vibrate their bodies to generate heat. Thousands of bee bodies shivering raises the temperature to around 33 degrees centigrade in the centre of the cluster. This is warm enough for the bees in the middle to consume the honey in the combs they are huddling on.

Life isn’t so cosy for the bees on the outside of the cluster though (only about 10 degrees) so the outside bees have to work their way back into the middle to warm up and feed leaving some of their sisters take a turn at shielding the colony from the cold. Whole colonies can starve, even with honey stores close by, if it is too cold to cross the gap. Fortunately I have never witnessed that first hand.  

January 11th

On warm days bees can break cluster and move across a gap to fresh combs still full of stores. They can also utilise such days to throw out any corpses and to fly out just far enough to void themselves.

Today is lovely so I strolled round to see what was happening and to make sure the strong winds hadn’t blown anything over. All the hives were intact. The mouse guards are still in place. There were no heaps of dead bees outside the entrances.

One thing caused me to raise an eyebrow though. The wood on my brand new hive looked saturated and I wondered if it was wet through to the inside, so I lifted the roof.  It was dry. A couple of bees buzzed me and I could see them all jostling about under the feed hole.

One hive had six bees crawling across the entrance and two dead bees had just been jettisoned.  I lifted the third roof just far enough to see it was busy round the feed hole. This all looks good.

The pallets that they stand on are really rickety, slippery and dangerous to move around on. We really must do something about it………some other day.

Val Hicken