Well - with much trepidation I opened up the hive this morning because:
The wind calmed down
and the sun came out!
So - I found about 2 handfuls of dead bees - half on the varroa mesh floor and half on/in the queen excluder (under the brood box) When I say 'in' I mean they seemed to be stuck in the excluder which I found very puzzling
I know drones are too big to get through but these were def workers so I have no idea what was going on - the excluder was one supplied (new) from Fragile Planet with our 'beginner hive' package - can you get queen excluders that are too small for workers??
Anyway - I did find some live bees
Ok, so the colony is
very very small - as in there were approximately large palm sized areas of clustering bees on 4 sides of 3 frames. I didn't want to muck about them about too much given all the upheaval and weather crap so didn't have a close inspection as to what was going on on each of these frames - I was just overjoyed to find some live bees. What I did was remove the dividers and put them on the outside - but I now wonder if I should have left them where they were and create an equivalent nucleus space so that the small number of bees that there are don't have to keep a whole brood box volume warm..... I also checked that the feeder had syrup (it does) and put a sheet under the mesh floor to try and stop any excessive draught going through the brood box given that there are only a few bees.There were some flying bees out and about, but not many so I think it is going to be a case of fingers crossed to see if this colony can build up enough to take it through the winter to hit the ground running next year.
I'll leave it a week now and do a more thorough inspection next week.
Thanks for the supportive comments - it really does help