Entry 04 · Wintering
Winter losses: three colonies, and what the combs said
Five colonies went into the winter of 2024 and two came out of it. Those three losses taught me more than any good year has, which is a sentence I would much rather not have earned.
- At the hive
- 17 November 2025
- Typed up
- 23 February 2026
- Reading
- 9 minutes
- Stand
- the Taunus foothills above Frankfurt
Opening a dead hive in February
A dead colony in February is quiet in a way a living one never is. There is no hum through the roof when you put an ear against it, no warm smell when the crown board lifts, and the bees on the floor have gone dry and light. I took all three boxes apart on the same cold afternoon, on a sheet of cardboard, and photographed every frame before I moved anything, because the arrangement of a dead cluster is most of the evidence and it does not survive handling.
The temptation is to write down cold and be finished. Cold almost never kills a colony of decent size here; a cluster holds twenty degrees or more above the air around it and manages perfectly well. What kills them is running out of something, or being too few to hold a cluster together at all, or sitting in the wet for weeks. Each of those three leaves a different trace, and all three of them were on the cardboard in front of me that afternoon.
Isolation starvation, with stores two frames away
The first hive had a cluster the size of a grapefruit on the third and fourth frames, bees head-first down in the empty cells, which is what starvation looks like when they go into the comb after the last of the food. Two frames to the left, untouched, sat four kilograms of sealed stores. That colony had not starved for want of honey. It starved because the cold spell in the middle of January ran long enough that moving sideways meant leaving the brood, and they would not leave it.
What I could have changed was the geometry rather than the quantity. I had left the stores where the colony put them in autumn, which was out at the edges of the box, and a cluster that forms over the brood nest in November may simply never reach them. Now I move the heaviest frames in against the cluster in the last warm week of October, and in January I lift the roof, lay a slab of fondant directly over the hole in the crown board, and have the roof back on within a minute.
Written on the card
- Cluster head-first in empty cells: they ran out where they sat
- Four kilograms of sealed stores two frames away, untouched
- Heaviest frames moved in against the cluster in late October
- Fondant over the crown-board hole in January, roof straight back
The colony that had been queenless since October
The second hive had almost nothing on the floor and a handful of bees in a loose ball, with drone brood in worker cells across two frames: a laying worker, or a queen who had run out, months earlier. Reading back through the cards, the evidence was sitting there in September as a single line about a small brood nest that I had written down and then not thought about again. A colony that goes into November without a laying queen does not have a winter problem. It has already finished.
The autumn inspection I do now is shorter and much more specific than the one I used to do. In the second half of September I want to see eggs, a brood nest that is compact rather than sprawling, and a box that feels heavy when I lift the back corner. If there are no eggs, the colony is united with a neighbour that has a queen, in September, while the weather still allows it. A hopeless colony is far easier to combine than to nurse, and nursing has never once worked for me.
Damp, ventilation and a roof propped wrong
The third hive was mine in the most ordinary way. I had wedged the roof up a centimetre in the autumn to let moisture out, using a strip of wood that I never checked again. Wind moved it in December, the gap opened to three centimetres on the windward side, and the crown board and the top bars were black with mould when I opened the hive in February. The cluster had been sitting in a draught with water running down the inside wall for weeks on end.
Bees tolerate cold and do not tolerate being wet. Since then the roof sits flat, the insulation above the crown board stays where it is all winter, and the only ventilation a colony gets is its entrance, which faces away from the prevailing wind and is reduced with a mouse guard from October. The stand is two blocks higher than it used to be as well, because the ground behind the sheds holds water and that corner in January is wetter than it ever looks in July.