Spring
March to May · 148 plants in flower · 95 bees on the wing
Spring is not the season of plenty people assume. It is the season in which demand rises faster than supply, and most colony failures happen here rather than in the cold.
The bee year
The bee year, quarter by quarter: what a colony is doing, what a solitary bee is doing, what is in flower, and what actually helps.
4 seasons · 296 plants · 110 bee species and groups
Three bee years, running at once
A honey bee colony is a perennial that survives winter as a cluster and therefore needs stores. A bumblebee colony is an annual that dies each autumn, leaving only mated queens. A solitary bee is an individual with about six weeks of adult life, spent entirely in one season. Those three timetables barely overlap, and advice written for one of them is frequently wrong for the other two.
Months here are northern-hemisphere temperate. Southern-hemisphere readers should shift by roughly six months — but that shift is an approximation rather than a translation, because day length, rainfall pattern and the local flora do not shift with it. Records that genuinely span both hemispheres say so.
Summer
June to August · 191 plants in flower · 102 bees on the wing
Summer is when honey is actually made, and when the colony is largest. It also contains the June gap — a real dip between the spring blossom and the mid-summer flow that catches out more beekeepers than the winter does.
Autumn
September to November · 149 plants in flower · 81 bees on the wing
Autumn decides whether a colony survives the winter, and it does so through one plant more than any other. Ivy in October is worth more to a northern European colony than most of what flowers in June.
Winter
December to February · 71 plants in flower · 41 bees on the wing
Winter is the season the whole honey bee strategy exists for. Storing honey only makes sense if a colony intends to survive as a colony through months with no forage — which is why honey bees make honey and almost no other bee does.