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How do bees survive winter?

BeesReviewed 2026-08-02

Short answerIt depends

Three completely different strategies. Honey bee colonies stay awake all winter as a shivering cluster, eating stored honey. Bumblebee colonies die entirely, and only mated new queens survive by hibernating alone underground. Solitary bees do not experience winter as adults at all — they overwinter sealed in a cell as larvae or dormant adults.

Where the belief comes from

Hibernation is the obvious guess and it is right for exactly one of the three groups. The honey bee's strategy — staying awake and burning stored fuel for months — is the unusual one, and it is why honey exists.

Honey bees: awake, clustered and shivering

A honey bee colony does not hibernate. It forms a tight ball around the queen and generates heat by decoupling the flight muscles from the wings and vibrating them — shivering, in effect. The cluster centre is held at around 20 °C when broodless and above 30 °C once brood rearing restarts, while the outside may be near freezing. Bees rotate between the cold outer mantle and the warm core so that no individual freezes.

That costs an enormous amount of fuel at a time when nothing is flowering, and it is the entire reason honey exists. The colony converts a resource available for three months into one that is still food in February. Winter bees are also physiologically different from summer ones — reared with a large fat body and high vitellogenin, they live four to six months rather than five to six weeks.

Bumblebees: everyone dies except the new queens

A bumblebee colony is annual. In late summer it produces males and new queens, they mate, and then the old queen, all the workers and all the males die. Only the mated new queens survive, and they do it by hibernating alone — usually a few centimetres down in loose soil or a north-facing bank, where the temperature stays stable and they will not be woken early by a warm spell.

This is why bumblebees store almost no honey: a few days' worth in a wax pot, because there is no colony to carry through. It also makes the queen the entire bottleneck. Everything about bumblebee conservation comes back to whether a queen survives hibernation and finds enough forage in her first weeks to found a nest.

Solitary bees: not present as adults at all

The great majority of bee species spend winter sealed inside a cell their mother provisioned and then abandoned. A red mason bee reaches full adulthood by late summer and then simply sits inside her cocoon until spring — ten or eleven months of a roughly twelve-month life spent dormant in a tube. Others overwinter as prepupae and complete development in spring.

This is why tidying matters so much. Cutting dead stems to the ground in autumn, clearing leaf litter, sealing walls and paving bare ground all destroy overwintering bees that are physically present and invisible. The single most useful winter action for wild bees is to leave things alone.

Sources

  • The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild — Princeton University Press (2019) · Monograph
  • The Biology of the Honey Bee — Harvard University Press (1987) · Textbook
  • Bumblebees: Behaviour, Ecology, and Conservation — Oxford University Press (2010) · Monograph

How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.

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