I ended my piece last month with a comment on wintering biology by saying, "For successful beehive wintering, a lot of guessing will be required." Nothing has changed since last month. So right from the start, preparing a colony - any colony - for Winter will contain a lot of "educated best guessing." Sometimes youll win, but you will also frequently lose. No beekeeper can look at a colony of bees and actually see wintering genetics. We can look at a colony of bees and see the effects of wintering genetics, but the genetic mechanism is tucked away in the dark insides of the individual bee and the queen mother. A colony may look and perform great during warm months but be disappointingly bad at surviving the Winter. There is no way to look at a new,caged queen and predict her genetic wintering characteristics.
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