Our bee colonies have been surviving on the stores that they were able to collect last season. Hopefully if you took off a good crop of honey, you left some for them and they were able to build on this with nectar from the ivy flow, the last main nectar crop of the year. We beekeepers should check each colonies' honey reserve before the end of the season and feed strong syrup to make up any shortfall. This is especially important for those late splits or nucs that we made up in the later half of the season. These need a little extra TLC to enable them to both build bee numbers and also store honey for the coming winter. Building numbers requires food but collecting surplus food requires large numbers if bees! It therefore aids the colony if we provide supplementary feed during their development.
When winter arrives the bees are no longer able to find any meaningful quantities of nourishment, they are totally reliant on the honey that they have within their hive. During the cold months the queen lays very few eggs or stops altogether, the colony therefore doesn't have to maintain a brood temperature of ~35°C. The colony without brood can get by with a cluster temperature of ~10°C. Bees generate and conserve heat by forming a tight cluster and vibrating their flight muscles (wings disengaged). The fuel for this heat generation is of course the honey that they have stored. The cluster will move around the hive slowly consuming their honey. In early winter the heat needed by the colony and so the honey they consume is relatively low, the heat loss from a 10°C cluster is such lower than a cluster at 35°C.
As mentioned earlier a bee colony must be strong in bee numbers inorder to collect a surplus of honey. When spring brings the first major nectar flows from dandelion and tree blossom the bees must have a large number of foragers ready to exploit these resources. They must, therefore build up their numbers before the nectar flows arrive, they do this by gearing up brood production in the later months of winter. In the UK in mid February......THAT'S ABOUT NOW! To do this they must raise the temperature of their cluster, maintaining ~35°C. This requires much more fuel (honey) and so their rate of consumption increases dramatically. The brood also needs to be fed, using up yet more honey! If they don't have sufficient honey stored away they are doomed to starve.
That is unless we as beekeepers can step in to help. We should, especially at this time of year, be checking the weight of our hives by hefting, if we have the experience to judge the weight by feel, or if not then by using a luggage type spring balance to hive us an accurate weight. Any light colonies must be fed if they are to survive. This is almost always the case for colonies overwintered on five or six frame nucs, there simply isn't the room in a nuc to provide enough feed for the winter.
It is still too cold to feed syrup to the bees, the feed provided must bee in the form of fondant placed directly over the bee cluster. This isn't the cheapest form of sugar but is a good investment if you compare it to the cost of replacing a colony of bees.
So get out there, heft or weigh your hives and get that fondant on those colonies that need it!
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