It's easy to bring on a cold snap, just make a few splits on the smallish side.
With that great warm weather early on, my hives built up bigger, sooner than I can ever remember, even with no feeding. I made my first splits earlier too. And, even though I'd taken splits from both of my hives and added empty combs in the brood nests, they started to look swarmy again, so I pulled another three frames from each one and set two more nucs. I hadn't shaken more bees into those two, since I just made them for swarm control, and It looked like there were plenty on them. I set baggies on both and they were taking the syrup nicely, and they were bringing in pollen.
Then, bam, a week of windy cold, with nights getting down to freezing. Today, I peeked inside and saw empty combs with queen cells in both nucs, and all the bees dead on the bottom.
Even my strong hives have had a good many dead bees at the entrance after two particularly cold nights (mostly drones on one hive). I don't think I remember ever seeing that. At first I thought it might be pesticide, but I'm pretty sure it was just the cold.
Chalk it up to a strange year. I put all my early splits over strong colonies with a double screen in between. It covers a multitude of my mistakes and optomism. I made some three way boxes that set on top and when they are boiling which doesn't take long, I move them into a double five frames and by then it has hopefully warmed up. We had eighties and then three days of freezing nights, a couple days of mild and now forecast back down to freezing. My way is a lot of work since I am still feeding the heater colony with baggies since we have no bloom yet, but it is safer. My bees have even decided to abort all sealed drone comb, so they must plan for more cold weather and my feed is now their reserve. Most of my bees would starve now if I couldn't continue feeding.
Hello Indiana! We've always thought of central Indiana as the tropics up here....
I can't control Michigan weather, but I can control the heat loss in a bee hive. I think it makes a big difference in a cold climate like mine, but I'm not a bee. Here's a photo of one of my queen mating nucs/apartment buildings. I made these up April 14th and have they're doing great. Saw some new virgin queens roaming around in them this weekend. They've came through the cold weather with flying colors.
(http://i1082.photobucket.com/albums/j365/MichiganBee/Queen%20Bees/AprilMatingNucs.jpg)
We got down to 22F last night! Didn't phase these little mating nucs a bit. They're like little toasters in there. There are 6 mating nucs on a platform and they're made from ¾" polystyrene. (that's 19mm for our metric crowd). Probably not more than 500 bees in each. I didn't shake in any extra. I also didn't feed these baby nucs anything. They just had the honey on the mating frames for food. Less heat loss = less heat they need to generate = lower rate of metabolism = less food they need to eat.
As Finski says, insulation really helps on those cold nights. 19mm of foam isn't all that much, but at R3.75, it's 5 times as insulated as a wood hive. These little mating nucs have top entrances too boot.
Blue, I guess since I don't get it every year, I'm not prepared for it.
Those queen-rearing nucs are impressive. Did you make those? I like to make as much of my beekeeping stuff as I can. I'm going to have to make a couple of polystyrene nucs for next year.
Yeah, they're homemade foam mating nucs. My mating frames are the size of a half a medium frame. 4 frames fit in each box. They're just made from a $10 sheet of ¾" extruded polystyrene foam I got from Home Depot. The top rim of the nucs is wood for the frame rests and the entrance tunnel.
(FYI, evidently a sheet foam can be more expensive in other parts of the country, than in MI).