Not Hibernating?

“I suppose your bees are all tucked up in bed hibernating?” is a question often asked at this time of year. Well, with the temperature at minus three, as soon as I took the lid off, the girls popped up to see what was going on so they’re not in the least bit sleepy.
When I first started bee keeping, the perceived wisdom was that the bees spent the winter huddled up together to keep warm - and didn't do  much else; it was a cardinal sin to take the lid off and let the cold in then, along came some researchers who opened their hives every day of the year to see what was going on - and their bees flourished.
 
These days, we know that the bees raise brood almost continuously throughout the winter, only pausing during the very coldest spells. After three weeks of sub-zero weather, there shouldn’t be any brood, it’s a matter of economics. In order to raise brood, they have to maintain the nursery temperature at thirty five degrees Celsius and, if the cost of the central heating is too high, the queen will stop laying until such time as the cost of maintaining a comfortable temperature comes down to a reasonable level. Three weeks is the duration of a brood cycle so there won’t be any sealed pupal cells in which the varroa mites can hide, so they will be vulnerable to the miticide treatment. That was why I was there in the bitter cold, with the lid off the hive, pouring oxalic acid solution over the bees.
 
I also needed to feed the brutes; at this time of the year there is no satisfactory way of giving them syrup, so they are given solids; some give bags of sugar (suitably moistened), some use baker’s fondant, but I use candy: basically a bloody great boiled sweet. Over thirty years ago I devised the “candy board,” a tray that fits the top of the hive and will take a four and a half kilogram block of the stuff (see the extra). It is gratifying to see that articles about candy boards are now occasionally appearing in magazines. The bees do need water to dissolve the sugar but, not only does Scotland have plenty of the stuff just falling out of the sky, the bees produce plenty since, when sugar is metabolised to produce energy, it also produces water and carbon dioxide.
 
All I need to do now is weigh each hive so that I can periodically check to see if they are running out of food.