it’s difficult to check on them; they ball up in the hive. If you disrupt that through the winter you kill the hive.
YOu cannot check the honey holders?
Thanks! I was wondering about that too. I figured there'd have to be a reason. The article read like the Beekeeper's attitude was, 'oh well, you are on your own bees -- see you in the Spring', but I figured there had to be a reason why the Beekeeper couldn't keep his livestock from starving to death.
I do remember a deep and prolonged cold Winter that killed off the gypsy moth population, knocking them back about twenty years.
Not having tent caterpillars all over the place was nice, not to mention the foliage and food crops that didn't get eaten by them.
“He says, in a normal winter, a hive needs about 60 pounds of honey. “And they just eat the food and then shiver their muscles (to create heat) and huddle together so they are warm enough, and they don’t get frozen.”
“But, this was no normal winter. And it also followed a very poor goldenrod season, a plant many honeybees use to make honey.”
“If they run out of food - which most likely is what happened this winter just because it’s cooler than usual, they would use more food,” says Huang. “And when they run out of food, they’re dead.”
“Huang says probably only one in ten of his hives survived the cold.”
http://michiganradio.org/post/harsh-winter-killed-many-michigans-honeybees
Wow. With a bad goldenrod season, the bees food pantry was probably already below normal before winter even started.