I ended my piece last month with a comment on wintering biology by saying, 'For successful beehive wintering, a lot of guessing will be required.' Nothing has changed since last month. So right from the start, preparing a colony – any colony – for Winter will contain a lot of 'educated best guessing.' Sometimes you’ll win, but you will also frequently lose.

No beekeeper can look at a colony of bees and actually see wintering genetics. We can look at a colony of bees and see the effects of wintering genetics, but the genetic mechanism is tucked away in the dark insides of the individual bee and the queen mother. A colony may look and perform great during warm months but be disappointingly bad at surviving the Winter. There is no way to look at a new, caged queen and predict her genetic wintering characteristics.

For the past two months in Bee Culture, I have reviewed the history and biology of wintering bee colonies. It’s time to implement something; but what? For the past 150 years, we have tried nearly everything. Yet, no single wintering procedure has risen to the top of the Winter management list. Warm climates, cold climates, mild Winters, severe Winters, Nosema, good queens, packed colonies, bad honey, wind breaks, frost pockets, ventilated hives, entrance reducers, food stores . . . the number of variables is staggering. Even so, some fundamental points shine through. Good luck and good genetics are starting places, but these points are vague and foggy. But thankfully, there are many good beehive manipulations that you can implement to help a colony survive the Winter season.

Most of us should start preparing our colonies for Winter in the late Summer and throughout the Fall season. Those of you in warm climates may be able to make changes throughout Winter, but your bees will be using more stores and energy flying on nectarless days. Other than simply putting on supers or deeps of honey, there is little most of us can do to help our wintering colony once the season is truly cold, so plan and implement early.

Many attributes of a good beeyard location are known. I will only discuss one attribute here – availability. Most of us keep our bees wherever we can; not necessarily where we should. We use what is available to us. Clearly, some yard sites are better than others and little can be done to change that, but a good, wind-protected yard is certainly a benefit to successful wintering. Establish Winter-friendly beeyards.

Some beekeepers go to extra measures to modify a yard location to make it better suited for beekeeping. If no natural wind breaks are present, protection from the wind can be improvised with snow fencing or even open-sheds.

There is a group of specialized commercial beekeepers who completely take over the wintering process by wintering indoors in climate-controlled conditions. These pioneers are laying the technical foundation for what may become a more typical wintering procedure for all of us in future years. Presently, it is prohibitively expensive for most of us. If any of you are routinely indoor wintering small numbers of colonies, I would enjoy communicating with you.

'The queen' as a Winter management category, reads so simply to be so challenging. I suppose it would be fair and honest to say that you should have a good queen in the colony all year long – not just Winter. But in recent years, that has become a challenge. Some commercial beekeepers now have to requeen every six months, some even more often. I don’t know what’s up with this queen problem. The traditional advice has always been to go into Winter with a young queen. Presently that may be easier said than done. Even so, you must try. Go into Winter with a good queen.

During mid to late Fall, rearrange the brood boxes so the cluster is on the bottom board. The instinctual tendency of the bees is to move upward as the season progresses. In a natural setting, a wintering colony of bees would move up on its honey stores as Winter passed and be high in the nest at the arrival of Spring. As they developed a brood nest and brought in new Spring nectar, they would fill the high brood nest with new nectar and push subsequent brood nests downward to a lower position. In this seasonal way, as the colony needs to, it moves up and down the combs. You, the beekeeper, short-circuit that process by moving the brood nest down in the Fall rather than waiting for the bees to do it next Spring/Summer¹. Go into winter with the cluster in the bottom deep.

No wintering colony has ever been harmed by having too much honey for Winter. If you have any doubts about how much honey to take, leave more on the colony. Successful feeding is tricky to accomplish; therefore, it is far easier to leave extra honey on the colony than to feed the colony supplemental feed. If you have light colonies, give supplemental feeding a try, but be realistic about the hungry colony’s prognosis. Abundant food stores are not the only factor of good Winter management. In recent years, I have taken significant honey crops from dead colonies. How weird is that? Abundant stores are important, but abundant stores alone won’t guarantee successful wintering. Even so, provide the wintering colony with abundant food stores.

Having some number of weak colonies simply cannot be avoided. Combine weak colonies together in an attempt to make a winterable colony. Alternatively, combine weak colonies with any other colony. You should kill the queen from the weak colony. She’s not worth reusing. Even in warm climates, trying to Winter a weak colony is usually beehive busy-work. Spend your time on the ones that have a chance at surviving.

Housing the colony in two deeps with a reduced lower entrance but supplemented with an upper entrance is the traditional way to shelter a bee colony in Winter months. As I discussed in Part I, we have historically tried many different Winter options. None work perfectly every time. Insulating and wrapping, as management recommendations, have come and gone many times. I feel that the concept of beehive insulation needs a serious revisit. Old data from old studies using old types of insulation materials in old ways is just that – old. Yet, from this old information, we continue to make modern-day recommendations that pooh-pooh Winter wrapping. Under proper conditions, I propose that a colony could benefit from year-round insulation procedures. And not just colony sides, but the top and bottom surfaces, too. But due to poorly adapted wintering genetics, even insulated hives will still sometimes house colonies that inexplicably die during Winter months. But overall, I posit that more insulated colonies are better suited for winter survival. But until I have new recommendations for you, Winter in two deeps with a reduced entrance.

In both cool and cold climates, provide for upper ventilation. Condensation accumulates at the top and upper insides of the hive. Providing a small ¼' crack beneath the inner cover and even the outer cover will be enough to let the wet air out.

So what about screened bottom boards? Though I don’t particularly dislike them, I don’t routinely use ventilated bottom boards. I have found them to be too lightly built to be used on colonies that are moved to pollination sites. I can’t tell that serious harm is done if the bottom stays open during the Winter, but if I can remember to do it, I insert the metal closure sometime in the late Fall.

Wintering beehives is not and has never been a sure thing. Not surprisingly, this short article series will not be the last word on wintering. Sooner or later, all beekeepers acquire amazing stories of Winter successes and failures – such as tiny clusters wintering well while large clusters fail. The same pressure is on feral honey bees living in tree trunks. Some make it while others don’t. The continual biological miracle is that any colony survives any Winter. As beekeepers, we nurture wintering colonies and clean up dead ones next Spring. Good luck with your guessing.