I sure wouldn't, especially if I'd spent hours foraging fuel to heat the house.
Bees don't "heat the house". They heat the cluster. Farrer's work proved this conclusively.
Energy wise it's more efficient for bees to overwinter in insulated surroundings, that bit is common sense.
Common sense to a bee? Or common sense to a human? Turn this around and ask yourself what a bee considers the perfect place to live. Hollow trees are not exactly well insulated and wooden boxes are less so, yet bees winter just fine in both hollow trees and wooden boxes.
We've got to consider the enclosures in which bees evolved, generally holes in trees to see that bees preferred a single bottom entrance
Seeley could do a bit more research. I've cut enough bee trees to know that bees show very little preference for location of the entrance as correlated with position of the hive/cluster. The primary factors for a swarm are size of the cavity, infestation with ants (no ants!), orientation of the entrance(not facing north in the northern hemisphere), size of the entrance (about 2 inches diameter is preferred), and height above the ground (minimum 10 feet up). This does not mean bees won't move into a tree with an entrance at ground level and with the cavity below ground down in the roots. Yes, I cut out a colony just like this. Bees living in an area with very few trees will readily move into any available ground cavity or even under a rock overhang. There is a cave in Puerto Rico with a dozen or so colonies of bees hanging from the roof.
Stating a fixed opinion on just about anything related to bees is IMO inviting the bees to prove you are wrong. That said, I live in a different climate than most who read and post here. I've found that an upper entrance works best with my bees kept in wooden boxes i.e. not poly or other heavily insulated constructions. I lost colonies when I first started beekeeping due to moisture accumulating on the top cover causing mold and dysentery. Once I learned to reduce the lower entrance and add a small upper entrance, winter survival was a lot more likely. I have not tried poly so have no idea if that would change the paradigm.
Mobus found that heavily insulated boxes caused a problem with water availability in the hive. This was under very specific conditions where he combined two large colonies for winter and placed the resulting cluster in a hive enclosed in thick insulation. By means of weighing bees and weighing the cluster, he proved that the bees were severely water deficient which caused them to fly out in the middle of winter to forage for water. Do a bit of math and you will find that metabolizing honey does not just release the @17 percent moisture that is in the honey, but the sugar molecule actually produces water as it oxidizes. C6-H12-O6 + 6 O2 = 6 CO2 + 6 H2O This suggests that wintering bees need to metabolize enough honey to meet their winter water needs given that they can't fly out and forage at low temperatures. A highly insulated hive prevents this cycle as the bees don't need to metabolize as much honey to keep warm. An interesting finding was that very small clusters of bees survived better in heavily insulated hives as compared to wooden boxes. Nice food for thought as winter nears.
All said, I still agree that matchsticks are a bad idea, just for different reasons. I find an upper entrance that a bee can enter and exit from is far better. A hole 3/8 to 1/2 inch diameter is plenty big enough.
