Khornet

Don't bother prospecting for silver/gold. As mentioned above, you want to find a deep quartz vein. They tend to get pretty big and there's "guaranteed" silver/gold chunks of 2-5 blocks in there.
There really is no other efficient way to mine for silver/gold than chaining up ore blasting bombs in massive excavated walls of underground quartz deposits. The downside is you end up with stacks upon stacks of quartz that you don't really need.
 

Skeps hibernate (deactivate all functions) at 0°C. Here's a wiki quote:
"Populations of bees will hibernate (stop swarming or producing honeycombs) at 0°C. Once the temperature reaches -10°C, all bee-related timers (swarm and production) will reset, and will only resume until the temperature rises above 0°C at the end of winter."

They still buzz though even if they're surrounded by mounds of snow, those bees simply never shut up... 🙃

In case anyone finds themselves struggling with water in a similar fashion; I reached out to Tyron directly and I got the following reply:
you can use world edit "/we ms" and "/we me" to select an area and "/we deletewater" to remove water inside the selection
In other words, use the magic wand/select tool to mark an area in creative mode, and then use the /we deletewater command. It works.
I can't believe it was that simple...