Arranging the winter nest: which combs to keep and how to put it together

Picture March. You open a hive that has gone silent, and you see a sight every beekeeper of a few seasons knows: a dead cluster wedged between the combs, bees' heads driven into empty cells, and two frames away, within arm's reach, several kilograms of sealed honey. This colony did not die because it had nothing to eat. It died because in the frost it could not reach the food. And that death did not happen in March. It happened in September, at the hive, the moment someone put its nest together badly.

That is the heart of this article. Volumes have been written about wintering, but the one who comes unstuck on it is not the one who does not know the theory, but the one who cannot physically put the nest together. Which combs to keep, which to throw out without sentiment, in what order to set them, and what to do before you flood in the stores. I assume you already know why wintering rests on a healthy winter bee, on pollen and on a dry nest. Here we get down to work and build the nest comb by comb.

One note to start: the numbers depend on the hive and frame you run, because a well-filled Wielkopolska comb is a completely different weight from a Dadant or a Langstroth. So I give principles and ranges, not one rigid figure to copy blindly.

How many combs to winter on

The rule is one: a colony winters on as many combs as it actually covers, plus usually one to the side for store. What counts is not how many combs the hive holds, but how many the bees will warm and use. A nest wider than the cluster is wasted heat and a place for mould, because the bees warm the cluster, not the hive.

You assess this at the last inspection, counting the densely covered seams. And let us deal at once with the pressure for a perfect, comb-for-comb fit, because it is not a matter of life and death. A slightly loose nest is not a tragedy. You see it clearly in nature: the typical tree cavity described by Seeley and Morse holds 30 to 60 litres, far more than a colony needs to warm, and the bees manage anyway. One comb more than the textbook says will not sink a colony, as long as the store is well arranged and the moisture has an escape. More important than narrowing is that water does not drip on the cluster and that it has store above it.

A colony too weak, one that barely covers a couple of combs, do not rescue with its own wintering, but unite it with another in autumn. Two weak ones joined into one will winter, each on its own often will not.

How many combs and boxes in a specific system

Now the specifics, because "as many as it covers" is easy to say, and it has to be turned into real numbers. Below are rough ranges for a strong, healthy colony in our climate. Treat them as a starting point, not dogma, because race, region and colony strength shift these values.

• Wielkopolska 18 and Wielkopolska mountain: usually 2 boxes, so the colony sits on a dozen or so combs vertically. A weaker one winters on 2 boxes, for example in a 2 by 5 arrangement.

• Wielkopolska: most often 1 box, often with a shallow super as an air cushion.

• Warszawski standard (a tall, narrow frame): 8 to 11 covered combs in one box, because the tall comb holds a lot of store above the cluster.

• Warszawski widened: 7 to 9 combs, because the comb area is larger.

• Dadant: 7 to 9 brood combs in one box, store mainly in those combs, possibly in a shallow super.

• Langstroth: most often 2 boxes, the colony on a dozen or so combs; with a weaker one, often wintering on a full single box.

• Zander and Gerstung: close to Langstroth and Wielkopolska, usually 1 strong box or 2 more thinly occupied.

• Ostrowska, Apipol, Apimaye: comb count as in the system they are based on; Apimaye, made of plastic with built-in insulation, forgives more when it comes to moisture.

• Mini Plus: a small system for nucs and queens, wintered as a complete module, not on single combs.

• Top bar and Warre: frameless or top-bar, they run by different rules; here you do not count classic frames, you leave a compact run of covered combs.

With multi-box hives one thing from practice is worth adding: very often you do not bother with meticulous nest assembly, you simply winter on full boxes. You leave as many boxes as the colony covers and can provision, and that is it. It is more convenient, far less work and less rummaging in the nest in autumn, and the colony arranges its own cluster anyway and moves up into the store above it. In large apiaries this is a choice of good sense, not laziness, because it saves hours across dozens of hives and takes nothing from the bees.

The general rule: the larger the frame and the taller the box, the more store a single comb holds, so on a Dadant or a Langstroth you winter on fewer combs than on a Wielkopolska, though in kilograms of store it comes out similar.

Which combs to keep and which to throw out

Here begins the one real controversy of this article, so let us state it plainly. The classic school says: winter on dark, brooded combs, because they are warmer, hygroscopic and give the cluster a better base. It sounds reasonable and generations were taught it. But that advice has a second, dark bottom. A black comb is a biological bin: a store of foulbrood spores that survive in wax for decades, of nosema spores, of residues from medicines and treatments, and on top of that it has cells narrowed by layered cocoons. Wintering on such a relic burdens the colony at the most sensitive moment, when it should quietly survive and produce healthy spring bees.

That is why my choice goes to the golden mean. I winter neither on black scrap nor on icy virgin foundation, which is cold and empty. Best is a young to medium comb, light brown, already brooded once or twice. It has the advantage of a warmer, brooded structure the cluster sits on well, but without the baggage of a black comb. The black ones I steadily pull from circulation and melt down, because replacing wax is the basis of nosema and foulbrood prevention anyway.

What else leaves the nest before winter, regardless of colour:

• damaged combs

• combs with leftover honeydew, heather or goldenrod honey, because that store crystallises and burdens the gut

• drone combs and heavily rebuilt combs

• freshly drawn, unbrooded combs as a cluster base, because they are cold

And what you must not throw out under any circumstances: frames with pollen and bee bread. The protein store in the nest is the foundation of the winter bee and the spring start, so bee bread stays in the nest always, even if the comb is not perfect.

How to arrange the store and where the cluster will settle

This is the part most often botched, and it decides the colony's life. The cluster in autumn settles low and by the entrance, and through winter it travels as one body up and to the side, following warmth and store. Your job is to arrange the nest so that store, not emptiness, always lies on the path of that journey.

In practice this means the honey belongs above the cluster and to its sides, and the cluster should settle where there is least store, that is in the lower, warmer part of the nest. In a multi-box hive the store is mainly in the upper box, and the cluster sits lower and in winter moves up into the honey above it. In a horizontal hive you arrange the store to the sides and above the top bars, and the cluster sits nearer the entrance. The classic horizontal-hive layout is store on both sides, and in the middle the lighter combs the cluster sits on, with store above its head.

The most dangerous mistake is to leave store to the side, behind an empty comb. In hard frost the cluster will not break to cross an empty comb for honey lying a few centimetres away, and the colony starves in a full hive. This is exactly the dead cluster from the start of the article. The phenomenon is called isolation starvation and I wrote about it more fully under wintering. The rule is one: it is not only how much store there is that counts, but where it lies relative to the cluster.

How much store, per comb

Here I return to honest ranges, because a single figure helps no one. A colony enters winter with store in the mid-teens of kilograms, and the longer and harsher the winter in your region, the closer to the upper limit. Spread it across the combs so that well-filled store combs stand above and around the cluster.

A simple sum helps per comb. A well-sealed, full comb holds store in proportion to its area: on a large frame, like Dadant or Langstroth, that is more kilograms per comb, on a smaller one, like Wielkopolska, correspondingly less. Instead of guessing, weigh a few full frames of your system once and properly, subtract the weight of a dry frame, and you have your own reliable conversion for years. It is five minutes of work that sets your whole store management.

For dosing the feed itself, use the conversion from the wintering article: a kilogram of sugar is roughly a kilogram of store, and a litre of ready invert is roughly a kilogram of sugar. So the missing mid-teens of kilograms you top up with roughly the same number of kilograms of sugar as thick syrup, or the same number of litres of invert.

Emergency winter feeding: candy board and alternatives

Everything above concerns the main provisioning, which you do in still-warm autumn. But winter can surprise you: the colony used more than you thought, or you wintered it a touch too light. Then the second layer comes in, the emergency feed. And here the key rule: in frost you do not give syrup. Liquid feed in the cold adds moisture the colony cannot evaporate, and the bee will not go far from the cluster for it anyway. In the cold only solid feed counts, placed straight over the cluster so the bee can reach it without breaking the cluster too much. Here are the options, from the most convenient.

Candy board. A shallow rim, a frame some two to five centimetres deep, which you fill with set sugar candy and stand straight over the nest. This is a proper winter insurance: the colony has store literally above its head and eats it only when it needs to. You glance from the top for a moment and see how much is left. Bonus: the candy board creates a warm buffer space over the cluster, and many beekeepers add a pollen patty there in spring when the queen restarts brood.

Fondant or sugar-honey cake. The same thing in an ad hoc version, without building a rim. Ready fondant or homemade cake you place straight on the frames over the cluster, for instance by cutting the wrapper on the underside so the bees eat from below and do not walk on the sticky mass. Quick and effective when you have to save a colony overnight.

Dry sugar, the mountain camp method. The simplest and cheapest. On the frames you lay a sheet of paper and pour dry white sugar onto it, lightly dampened so it clumps. The hive's humidity turns it into a hard slab the bees nibble as needed, and along the way the sugar absorbs excess moisture from the nest. Two caveats: never use icing sugar, because it contains starch and causes dysentery, and do not let the paper stick out beyond the box, because it wicks moisture inside. One drawback: on a warmer day the bees can carry dry sugar out as rubbish, so it is less reliable than a cake.

A protein patty, but only deliberately. This is no longer a rescue from starvation but a shot of protein for early brood. You place it over the cluster only in late winter, when you want to stimulate development, never too early, because you would kick off brood rearing in the frost and the colony would start burning stores and working beyond its strength. Protein is a tool for the turn of winter and spring, not for December.

The common denominator of all these methods: it is an emergency reserve placed over the cluster, not a way to wave off autumn provisioning. First provision the colony properly with thick syrup or invert, and keep the candy board or sugar as an insurance the colony will use only if the need arises.

Order: nest first, store second

The work makes sense only in the right order. First you inspect and tidy the nest: assess strength, throw out the combs for culling, keep the right frames and the bee bread, set them in the right order, narrow the nest and insert the division board. Only onto a nest prepared like this do you flood the store.

This matters for two reasons. First, there is no sense pouring sugar into a mess you will rearrange anyway. Second, flooding the nest with thick store has another job that is easy to forget: filled combs limit the queen's laying space and help shut down late brood, so the young bees pass into the winter form instead of wearing themselves out nursing. The thick store at the end is therefore not only a larder but also a signal to close the season in the nest.

At the end comes the finishing: top and possibly side insulation, checking ventilation, narrowing and protecting the entrance, and a mouse guard, before the bees settle into the cluster and stop defending the entrance.

What nature teaches us: cavities, logs and minimal intervention

Everything we do in assembling the nest is really an attempt to make up for what a wild bee gets for free. So it is worth glancing for a moment at how a colony winters when no one touches it.

A wild colony winters in a cavity of some 30 to 60 litres, with thick, insulating walls, a single small entrance high up and an interior lined with propolis. The result is that such a colony loses four to seven times less heat than the same bee in a thin-walled hive. It winters on its own honey, never on sugar, and through the whole winter no one opens it. This is the standard our management only approaches.

In Poland we have a living tradition of it: tree beekeeping. A barc is a cavity hewn in a living tree, a log hive is a hollowed log stood up or hung, both imitating the bees' natural dwelling. The thick wooden walls insulate superbly, and the colony winters in them on honey, tended once in a while rather than constantly. This is not folklore: the tree beekeeping culture of Poland and Belarus was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage in 2020, and a twin tradition survives in Bashkiria, where wild and log colonies live in the forests at a density of a few per square kilometre.

What can you take from this to your own apiary, even if you keep bees in ordinary hives? A few things: solid insulation, especially at the top, to come closer to the warm interior of a cavity; a smaller, higher entrance that is easier to defend and that snow will not block; leaving the colony a decent store instead of taking everything to the last drop; wider spacing between hives, which limits drifting and the spread of disease. And most important in winter: peace and quiet.

The less you look, the better

This is perhaps the hardest lesson for a beginner, because the hands itch to check. And in winter every opening of the hive is a loss. You lift the insulation and the crownboard, let out the accumulated heat and the more humid, warmer air, chill the cluster and force the colony to rebuild a microclimate it built over weeks. No one opens a wild colony, and that is one of the reasons it copes on its own.

So once the nest is assembled and flooded with store, your work at the hive is essentially over until spring. You monitor from the outside, without taking the nest apart: you listen to the colony by putting your ear to the wall or tapping it, you judge the weight of the hive by lifting it from the back, you watch the entrance and the drop on the tray, you check that the entrance has not been blocked and that there are no signs of mice. All of this tells you a great deal and costs the colony not a single degree of heat.

There is a limit here though, and I have to state it honestly, because the natural approach gets distorted. Minimal intervention in winter is wisdom. But year-round non-inspection combined with no varroa monitoring and no treatment is, in a dense apiary, not nature but neglect, which ends in dead colonies and a varroa bomb for the neighbours. Wild colonies cope without us because they live thinly scattered and through harsh selection in which the weak simply die. In an apiary you do not have that luxury. So take the principles from nature, that is insulation, quiet and good stores, but do not confuse minimal intervention with letting the colony's health slide.

Curiosities and controversies

Dark or light combs, a dispute with no single answer. This is the hottest controversy of the topic. The old school defends dark combs as warmer and better at holding moisture. The hygiene school hits back that a black comb is a reservoir of foulbrood spores, nosema spores and residues, so wintering on it is a risk. The truth lies in the golden mean: a comb brooded once or twice, light brown, combines the advantages of both sides, and the black scrap has to be pulled from the apiary anyway.

The pollen frame: centre or edge. A small but real difference of opinion. Some push the bee bread nearer the centre of the nest, so the cluster has it to hand for early brood. Others move it slightly to the side, so that too large a slab of pollen does not form a cold, damp bridge in the heart of the cluster. In practice one bee bread frame at the edge of the covered nest is a safe compromise.

Store above the cluster beats amount of store. You can give a colony masses of honey and still lose it if it lies in the wrong place. In frost the cluster will not reach store behind an empty comb, so a well-arranged mid-teens of kilograms winters a colony better than a badly arranged twenty. Arrangement matters more than tonnage.

Warm build-up versus a tight nest. A belief circulates that the tighter and warmer, the better. Partly so, because a compact nest is easier to warm, but overdoing the sealing ends in condensate on the cluster. Narrow and insulate with sense, but do not shut the colony in a wet, sealed box.

Wild colonies endure what kills ours. Colonies living in trees can tolerate levels of deformed wing virus that would flatten a colony in an apiary. They pay a high price for it, though: where the weak simply die and the strong throw a swarm, selection does its work. In an apiary that selection is absent, because we rescue every colony, which is why wild resistance cannot be copied by management style alone.

Three myths

Myth one: you should leave as many combs as possible so the bee has store. The opposite. Combs beyond what the colony covers are wasted heat, mould and greater risk, not safety. You winter on as many combs as the bee actually covers, not as many as fit in the hive.

Myth two: the darker the comb, the better for winter. Once repeated, now heavily questioned. A dark comb is warmer, but can be loaded with spores. Safer is a young to medium comb, already brooded, while the black one you pull from circulation rather than honour with wintering.

Myth three: feed until the bees stop taking it. It sounds sensible and it is unreliable. Bees take and store syrup for as long as they have room and it is warm enough, so blind feeding ends in a jammed nest with no room for the cluster. And if they stop taking it, that is often not because they have enough but because it has turned too cold, and you are left with uncapped, watery syrup that ferments. The right way is different: work out how much store the colony already has, subtract it from the target, and give the missing, specific amount as thick syrup or invert, early, while the bee can still process and cap it. And a candy board or fondant is not a way to do the main provisioning, but a winter insurance: you place it over the cluster as an emergency reserve the colony eats only if it runs short of its own, and which, unlike liquid syrup in the cold, adds no moisture.

Most common mistakes

Store to the side, behind an empty comb. The classic route to isolation starvation and death by hunger in a full hive. Honey belongs above the cluster and around it.

Bee bread thrown out. The protein store stays in the nest always. Without it the winter bee and the spring start are at risk.

The cluster on cold virgin foundation. A freshly drawn, unbrooded comb as a cluster base is cold. The cluster is settled on a comb already brooded once.

Flooding store before tidying the nest. Inspection and nest assembly first, store second. The reverse order is double work and a mess in the larder.

Peering into the nest in frost. Every winter opening of the hive lets out heat and humid air and chills the cluster. Once the nest is assembled, you monitor the colony from the outside rather than taking it apart in the cold.

A late mouse guard. You fit it before the bee settles into the cluster and stops defending the entrance, because later the intruder does damage you cannot fix in winter.

Sources and further reading

• Seeley T. D., Morse R. A. (1976). The nest of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.). Insectes Sociaux 23: 495-512. On the volume and architecture of the natural nest, a reference point for tolerance of larger space.

• Fries I. (1988). Comb replacement and Nosema disease in honey bee colonies. Apidologie 19: 343-354. Basis for retiring old, dark combs.

• Genersch E. (2010). American foulbrood in honeybees and its causative agent, Paenibacillus larvae. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 103: S10-S19. On the decades-long persistence of spores in wax, background for judging black combs.

• Mitchell D. (2023). Honeybee cluster, not insulation but stressful heat sink. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. On the cluster, insulation, and the fact that bees tolerate more space than tradition assumes.

• Kraus B. (1997). Work on the effect of nest humidity on varroa reproduction. Context for prioritising a dry cluster over a dry whole hive.

• Seeley T. D. (2019). The Lives of Bees, and the concept of Darwinian beekeeping. Basis of the chapter on natural wintering and minimal intervention.

• Tree beekeeping culture in Poland and Belarus, inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage (2020). Background for the tradition of logs and tree hives.