The bee year: three timetables running at once

Three strategies, one landscape

A honey bee colony is a perennial superorganism. It survives winter as a cluster, shivering its flight muscles to hold over 30 °C at the core while the outside of the hive freezes, and it consumes roughly 20 to 25 kg of stored honey doing it. That is the entire reason honey exists in quantity: storing food only makes sense if you intend to be alive as a colony in February.

A bumblebee colony is annual. A queen founds it alone in spring, it peaks at a few dozen to a few hundred workers, it produces new queens and males in late summer, and then everything dies except those mated queens, each of whom hibernates alone in a hole in the ground.

A solitary bee — which is most bees, around ninety per cent of species — has no colony at all. A female emerges, mates, provisions cells with pollen for perhaps six weeks, and dies. The next generation stays sealed in the nest until the following year.

Spring: expansion outrunning the forage

Spring is not the season of plenty people assume — it is the season in which demand rises faster than supply. A honey bee colony can go from 10,000 to 50,000 bees in a few weeks, driven by day length rather than temperature, and every larva needs pollen. The classic starvation happens in April rather than January, because the colony is consuming faster than it can collect and a week of cold rain removes foraging entirely.

Meanwhile a bumblebee queen is doing all of it herself: foraging, laying and incubating, with no workers until the first brood matures. A cold fortnight with nothing in flower kills the whole prospective colony. This is why February and March forage matters out of proportion to its quantity.

Autumn: the season that decides the winter

In late autumn a honey bee colony rears a physiologically different worker. Winter bees carry elevated vitellogenin, a storage protein that lets them live four to six months rather than six weeks, and they are reared on the last good pollen of the year — which is why autumn pollen matters more than autumn nectar. Ivy, flowering from September to November, does most of that work in northern Europe.

The same ivy determines whether a new bumblebee queen builds enough fat to survive six months underground. And the solitary bees are already dead, leaving provisioned cells in hollow stems and bare soil — which is why an autumn tidy-up that cuts stems, clears litter and turns over soil destroys next year's bees invisibly.

Winter: awake, warm, and eating

Honey bees do not hibernate. The cluster stays awake and metabolically active all winter, restarts brood rearing in January, and flies on any day above about 10 °C. Bumblebee queens are underground. Solitary bees are sealed in cells as larvae or pre-pupae, waiting on a temperature cue that a warming climate is quietly shifting.

One genuine recent change is worth knowing: buff-tailed bumblebee colonies now overwinter actively in southern Britain and parts of western Europe, foraging on winter-flowering garden shrubs. That is new behaviour within living memory, driven by warmer cities and by what people plant in them.