Bee Lines: Colonies out in the cold

by Sam Hall –

The extremely cold weather day after day will very likely have a negative effect on my honeybee colonies.  Honey bees form a cluster when the temperature drops to under 45 degrees.  They reverse their wing muscles from the normal flying configuration to allow them to flex their muscles without flying and it is this flexing done by several thousand bees that creates heat.  The temperature is about 60 to 65 degrees in the cluster.  The cluster is always in motion.  The bees at the center are working their way to the outside and the outside bees are working their way inward so that they all get some heat and some cold.  The queen will be at or near the center of the cluster.  In spite of this several thousand workers will die during the winter.

The dilemma faced by the bees when there are extremely cold temperatures day after day is if they run out of honey stores where they are located they cannot break cluster to move to where there is more honey.  If they move they will freeze before they can re-cluster.  If they stay where they are they will starve to death.  They always choose to starve. I believe it may be because the queen is there and they will not leave her.  That leads to the situation we had a couple of years ago where the temperature went well below freezing for over two weeks.  I had several colonies that had 75-100 pounds of honey but the bees starved to death.  You would find them sometimes less than an inch from more honey.  Their heads would be buried deep into the empty cells trying to get the last available drop before perishing.  It was sickening.

There really isn’t too much the beekeeper can do.  I do wrap my hives with 15 weight tar paper. This is not for insulation but it is for those sunny days when the tar paper will absorb the sun rays warming it and in turn warm the inside of the hive, allowing the bees to break cluster and move to new stores.  We have had a few of such days. I can only hope.

The bees can easily handle a few days of this weather but not when it has lasted for several consecutive days like the present.  It would be better if we had deep snow covering the hives as that is the best insulation there is.  Some years ago I had a single deep colony that I was overwintering and it became buried in the snow.  As the snow melted I discovered that the snow immediately around the hive had melted to about 4 to 8 inches away from the hive because of heat from the hive.  In this space the bees had come out and made cleansing flights thereby helping to keep disease out of the colony and keep them healthy.

No one knows what this prolonged cold is doing but I am concerned if not fearful for the damage it is doing to my bees.  I wish I had space to bring them inside but I do not.

Is our current weather related to global warming? I don’t know. I was alive in the 1930s but don’t remember a lot about them.  My father said there was a night at the farm in Allegany County that it went to minus 40 degrees killing many trees including the orchard.  He said he could hear the trees splitting during the night and many of them did not survive.

Hopefully we will be through this cold shortly. One of the great things about living in western New York is that you don’t really have to worry too much about the current weather, for whatever it is, it will change.

Sam Hall is a Western NY beekeeper who first worked bees as a child growing up on a ‘dirt farm’ in Allegany County, NY. He has kept bees for most of his adult life and believes that his mistakes ‘far outnumber his successes.’