A colony in winter can only lose weight. There is nothing flowering, the bees do not fly, and they are eating stores. Hive 7 puts on between three and five hundred grams a week from Christmas to February.
I have eleven colonies on two sites and I have kept bees for nineteen years.
Winter weight is the most important number in beekeeping and it is the simplest.
In autumn a colony goes into winter with stores: honey they made and sugar syrup you fed them. From about October to March there is nothing to collect, the bees cluster and do not fly except on a warm day to void, and the whole colony sits there eating.
So the hive gets lighter. Every week, without exception, from autumn to the first willow in March.
You weigh to know how fast. A colony burning through its stores too quickly will starve in February, which is when most winter losses actually happen, and a beekeeper who weighs can put a fondant block on in time.
Six of mine are on electronic scales, which is a pad under the hive and a display, and I log them daily. The other five I heft, which is lifting the back with one hand and knowing.
Hive 7 gains.
From about the twentieth of December to the middle of February, between three hundred and five hundred grams a week.
Every winter since 2019.
The arithmetic is what makes this not a curiosity.
A strong colony in January eats about seven hundred grams a week. So hive 7 is not just failing to lose seven hundred grams, it is putting on four hundred on top of that.
Over eight weeks that is about nine kilos of difference against every other hive on the site.
Nine kilos is a full super of honey. In January.
Everything I have checked, and I have been at this for six winters.
The scale. Swapped with hive 4's scale in the winter of 2020. Hive 7 gained on hive 4's scale and hive 4 lost on hive 7's.
Both scales are temperature compensated and I have the calibration weights and I check them with a known five kilo block, which I do every autumn.
Water. This is the good answer and I hoped for it for two years. Rain sitting on a roof, or damp in the woodwork, adds weight, and hive weights do wobble with the weather.
But rain comes and goes, and this is a straight line. And I put hive 7 under a shelter in 2021, a proper open sided one, and there has not been rain on it since, and it gains.
Snow. Same answer, and we have had two winters with none.
A swarm moving in. In January, from nowhere, into an occupied hive, nine kilos of it.
What is inside.
You do not open a hive in January. It kills the colony: you break the cluster and let the heat out and they cannot rebuild the temperature.
So I have waited for the first proper day, which is usually late March, six winters running.
Hive 7 in March is a normal colony. Healthy, decent size, the queen laying, and the stores are about what a colony has left in March, which is not much.
Not nine kilos more. Not one kilo more. Normal.
So it gains nine kilos between Christmas and February and by the end of March the nine kilos is not in the hive.
The frames.
I have weighed them. In 2023 I took hive 7 apart in April, frame by frame, on a set of kitchen scales on the tailgate, and wrote every one down.
Twenty three point one kilos of frames, bees and stores.
Hive 4, done the same afternoon, the same way: twenty two point six.
Half a kilo apart, which is nothing, and which is what two colonies of the same strain in the same apiary should be.
The trace.
The scale logs every fifteen minutes and I keep the files.
The gain is not steady through the day. It is almost all between about two and four in the morning.
Daytime, hive 7 does exactly what every other hive does, which in January is a very slow decline and a small wobble with temperature.
Between two and four it goes up, in steps, and the steps are between forty and ninety grams, and there are usually four or five of them.
Forty to ninety grams is worth writing down for a beekeeper, because a bee weighs about a tenth of a gram and a bee full of nectar weighs a bit more. Forty grams is roughly three hundred bees.
Three hundred bees arriving at once, at three in the morning, in January, at a temperature where a bee outside the cluster dies in minutes.
The entrance.
I put a camera on it in the winter of 2022. A trail camera on a post, infrared, a metre away, pointed at the entrance block.
It triggered eleven times over the winter. Nine of them are a mouse and one is a wren and one is nothing.
None of them is at three in the morning, and the camera runs all night and its own log confirms it was awake.
So nothing goes in through the entrance.
What I do now.
I keep hive 7. It is the best colony I have and it always has been: it comes through winter strong, it builds up fast, and it gave me sixty two pounds of honey last season.
I have stopped putting fondant on it, because it does not need it and never has, and that means one less trip in the cold, and my wife says I look better for it.
The honey from it is honey. It goes in jars and to a farmers' market and one year it won third in a county show, and I have eaten it every day for six years.
The only thing I have changed is the site plan I keep on the shed wall, where every hive is a numbered square.
Hive 7 is at the end of the row nearest the hedge, where it has always been.
Last winter I drew the hedge on the plan for the first time in nineteen years, because a new man asked me which way the entrances faced, and I found when I had finished that I had drawn hive 7 outside it.