as I posted on the Blog I'm doing a bit of a straw poll on winter losses across the forums.
This is not a "scientific" poll by any stretch of the imagination and I'm not trying to compare forum by forum or hive type by hive type, just to get what might be some interesting figures on how bee colonies have done this winter. I've done a trawl of forums that don't have a specific winter loss thread but I was just hoping that if people were interested in an entirely non scientific bunch of figures.
At the moment I've counted across the various UK forums (and other firm numbers that I know of) 361 colonies (nucs and full hives) reported as going into winter with 52 recorded losses (14.4%)
For the purpose of these figures, colonies reported as drone laying, superseded or combined at this point I've not counted as a winter loss.
I dare say that these are optimistic numbers, but I do have a fair few reports of large numbers of colonies that should be offsetting guys like me with 1-3 colonies, in fact at the moment I'm running nearly double the average number of colonies compared to BBKA numbers (8 per beek compared to their average 4.7)
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