A dry, dark cellar or special repository built in a sidehill or with
double, filled walls, like those of an ice house, may be utilized for
wintering bees in extremely cold climates. It should be so built that a
temperature of 42° to 45° F. (the air being fairly dry in the cellar)
can be maintained during the greater part of the winter. To this end
it should be well drained, furnished with adjustable ventilators, and
covered all over with earth, except the entrance, where close-fitting
doors, preferably three of them, should open in succession, so as to
separate the main room from the outside by a double entry way. The
colonies, supplied with good queens, plenty of bees, 20 to 25 pounds
of stores each, and with chaff cushions placed over the frames, are
carried in shortly before snow and severe freezing weather come.
Any repository which is damp or one whose temperature falls below
freezing or remains long below 38° F. is not a suitable place in which
to winter bees. When in repositories, the bees have no opportunity for
a cleansing flight, nor do they, when the temperature rises outside,
always warm up sufficiently to enable the cluster to move from combs
from which the stores have been exhausted to full ones; hence in a cold
repository they may possibly starve with plenty of food in the hive.
As a rule, colonies would be better off out of doors on their summer
stands than in such places.