Below is a comment from a viewer, pertinent to over-wintering bees in fully insulated hives, and my response:
Viewer:
One thing I noticed is that when Per a Feb 2024 study, I decided to insulate, I got a million answers for why it’s wrong. the only problem it caused and I don’t know if it was that or the crazy year we had. Is I had a hive go gung ho and raise like 6 frames of brood in Dec. Between the end of Oct and the end of Nov, it had consumed more than 100# of honey and starved out.
Sodbuster Response:
There could be several factors involved, and I don’t think that the insulation was a contributor. These may or may not apply to your case:
Bees are generally stimulated to raise brood when days lengthen and/or nectar flow increases. The first factor, which allows the bees to prepare for oncoming blooms, mainly depends on the bees’ genetics for when they produce brood and how quickly they build up. Bees better suited for southern climates (e.g. Italian bees) will build up earlier (and/or continue producing brood later in fall/winter) and produce more brood, which can be out of sync and create issues for the colony in a northern climate. I’ve talked to many people in northern states who ask me why they have difficulty keeping colonies through winter. In these cases I can usually predict, before asking, that they populate their colonies with packages shipped from the south.
The second factor – nectar availability – is something that we can simulate by feeding sugar, and most recognize this as a tool to build up colonies in spring. But feeding over winter can unnaturally stimulate brood production, creating a population that will quickly eat through stores. I heard a speaker (but, regretfully, I don’t recall who) express a point I agree with: winter feeding can, ironically, contribute to spring starve-outs when the colony builds up inappropriately early and the population consumption exceeds the honey stores.
Some have argued that if a hive is insulated and the bees move around more, then they’ll use up honey faster, but that’s a hypothesis with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Bees in cluster burn a lot of calories to vibrate their wing muscles and generate heat, while bees out of cluster but with no particular jobs, such as foraging or raising brood, are doing little to require more calories. To my knowledge, bees don’t aimlessly snack like we would be prone to do. My observations of my insulated vs. uninsulated hives confirm that the insulated regularly have more honey left at the end of winter.
I don’t know where you’re located, where you got your bees, or how you keep them, so the above may or may not apply. You might be right that weird weather – like late warm weather stimulating out-of-season blooms – might be a factor. Like you, I’ve heard naysayers explaining why insulation is a bad idea. But I know that my locally caught bees, and the colonies propagated from them, are usually thriving, come spring, with full insulation and no winter feeding.
Please watch this video for more information about why I chose to completely insulate my hives:
