Winter Losses

[Trog]

It's still possible to have heavy winter losses without varroa; it happened here a few years ago when everyone in Scotland lost lots of bees, regardless of their varroa status. I reckon our losses that year (we went down from 8 to 3 colonies) were due to wildly see-sawing temperatures which caused more condensation than the bees could cope with. The hives were dripping wet when eventually opened up. We lost one colony to isolation starvation this winter, around Christmas and, no, we hadn't left the qx in! They were our least-native ones and the least nice-mannered.

[Neils]

I stopped counting in the end. It was interesting excercise, and even trying my hardest to count anything that could be considered a winter loss I eventually hit <10% loss. Part of the problem might actually be what to consider a loss. I've got 1 colony going absolutely bonkers with 3 supers on it at the moment and 2 that are struggling, one especially so. Neither of them I'd actually consider a winter loss though.

What eventually became obvious was that people reporting losses were the 4-5+ colony beekeepers. the 1-2 colony guys reported everything as being fine, but rarely "everything's died" and the later in this particularly balmy spring the more the good news came in.

I would like to thank everyone that responded on the various forums and by email to let me know how they'd got on, I just don't think I'm getting accurate figures and/or I don't have the right methodology sorted to get a decent picture.

I guess it's possible that this is a fantastic year and most people didn't lose a significant number of colonies, the BBKA's figures will be interesting.