Show me the honey...

The amount of honey the bees eat each week during the winter varies a lot. Although a big colony of bees needs more food than a small colony, the small colony has to work harder at keeping warm. If there's brood present they'll eat even more.
As a rough guide I expect my bees to eat between 300 g - 1 kg of honey each week! In a worst case scenario, if no forage was available from November to end of March my bees would need up to 20 kg of honey to get through winter (about 44 jars).
All this honey is stored mostly above the bees. I've tried to show this in the diagram below:

The top box weighed 22 - 25 kg at the beginning of winter but as the weeks go by it will get lighter as the bees munch through the honey. It will be almost empty by the end of winter so if it gets really windy in March I'll have to put some bricks on the tops of the hives to stop them from being blown over!