What bees do in spring
Three completely different strategies unfold at once — a colony scaling up, a queen starting from nothing, and a solitary female with six weeks to live.
Honey bees
The colony begins rearing brood in late winter and accelerates hard through March and April, driven by day length rather than by temperature. Population can rise from perhaps 10,000 bees to 50,000 in a few weeks, and every one of those larvae needs pollen — protein — as well as nectar. This is the point at which stores run out: the classic spring starvation happens in April, not January, because the colony is consuming faster than it can collect and a week of cold rain removes foraging entirely. It is also swarming season. A colony that has filled its space raises queen cells and roughly half of it leaves with the old queen, which is reproduction at the colony level rather than a malfunction.
Bumblebees
A bumblebee queen emerges alone from hibernation, having spent the winter underground with no colony and no stores. She must find nectar to fuel herself and pollen to provision the first brood cells, then incubate them with her own body heat while continuing to forage. Everything depends on her: there are no workers until the first brood matures, and a cold fortnight with nothing in flower kills the whole prospective colony. This is why February and March forage matters out of all proportion to its quantity — a queen needs a little, daily, at a time when there is almost nothing.
Solitary bees
The majority of bee species are solitary, and for most of them spring is the entire adult life. A female mining bee emerges, mates, digs or finds a nest, and spends perhaps six weeks provisioning cells with pollen before dying — the next generation stays underground until the following spring. Several are specialists tied to a single plant family, so their emergence is synchronised with a particular flowering, and a mismatch caused by a warm February or a late frost has no fallback.
What actually helps in spring
Early forage, in that order of priority: something in flower in March, then nesting sites, then everything else. Willow, blackthorn, flowering currant, dandelion and the spring bulbs are worth more than any amount of June planting. Leave dandelions alone until May. And leave patches of bare, sunny, undisturbed soil, because that is where seventy per cent of bee species nest and no flower substitutes for it.
Social bees flying now
- Western honey beeApis melliferaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Asian honey beeApis ceranaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- BumblebeesBombusEusocial, colony dies each autumn
- Stingless beesMeliponiniEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Giant honey beeApis dorsataEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Himalayan giant honey beeApis laboriosaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Dwarf honey beeApis floreaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisEusocial, colony dies each autumn
Solitary bees flying now
31in the catalogue, showing the first nine. Around ninety per cent of the world’s bee species are solitary, so this is the normal way to be a bee rather than the exception.
- Mason beesOsmiaExceptional orchard pollinators. Because they carry pollen dry and loose on the abdomen rather than wetted and packed into a leg basket, a far greater proportion falls off onto the next flower. Published comparisons commonly find that a few hundred female mason bees pollinate an orchard acre as effectively as a full honey bee colony of tens of thousands. They also fly in cooler, duller weather than honey bees, which matters enormously for fruit that blossoms in April.
- Mining beesAndrenaEnormously important in spring, especially for orchard fruit, willows and early crops, at a point in the year when honey bee colonies are still small and reluctant to fly. Specialist species are often the most effective pollinators of their host plants by a wide margin, because their whole life history is built around that flower.
- Carpenter beesXylocopaGenuinely mixed. Important and effective pollinators of large open flowers and of several tropical crops including passionfruit, and capable buzz-pollinators. On deep tubular flowers they frequently rob rather than pollinate. The honest summary is that they matter, and not uniformly.
- Yellow-faced beesHylaeusModest per individual and genuinely useful in aggregate, particularly for small-flowered plants that attract little else. Internal pollen transport reduces incidental transfer compared with a dry-scopa bee, so they are less efficient pollinators than mason bees for the same number of visits — a direct consequence of how they carry the load.
- Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesImportant pollinators of legumes in Europe and of composites — sunflowers above all — in the Americas. Melissodes species are significant wild pollinators of commercial sunflower and cotton, and their presence measurably increases seed set alongside managed honey bees. Their role in the Ophrys orchid system is ecologically small and biologically remarkable: the orchid gets pollinated, the bee gets nothing at all, and the whole arrangement depends on the male emerging first.
- Red mason beeOsmia bicornisOutstanding, and for a specific mechanical reason. Pollen carried dry and loose on the abdomen sheds readily onto the next flower, where a honey bee's wetted corbicular pellet does not. She also flies in cooler, duller weather than honey bees, which matters enormously for fruit blossoming in April.
- Tawny mining beeAndrena fulvaA useful early pollinator of fruit blossom, currants and gooseberries, and of spring garden flowers. It flies in cool weather when honey bees are still clustered, which is where its value concentrates.
- Digger beesAnthophoraImportant early-season pollinators, and specifically of deep tubular flowers — lungwort, comfrey, dead-nettles, rosemary and the like — where their long tongues let them feed legitimately rather than robbing. They fly in cooler weather than honey bees and start weeks earlier.
- Plasterer beesColletesEfficient pollinators, with the specialists particularly effective on their host plants. Their short tongues restrict them to open and shallow flowers, so they concentrate on composites, umbellifers, heathers, ivy and willow rather than on deep-tubed plants.
Cuckoo bees flying in spring
8 cleptoparasitic species in the catalogue fly now: Cuckoo bees, Cuckoo bumblebees, Sharp-tailed bees, Blood bees, Mourning bees, Nomad bees, Vestal cuckoo bumblebee, Dark bees. They build no nest and gather no pollen for their own young, laying instead in another bee’s provisioned cell — and their presence is a sign of a healthy host population rather than a problem with it.
Guides that go deeper
- What is a honey bee?A specific insect, not a category. Nearly everything people know about bees is drawn from one species out of roughly twenty thousand.
- Inside a honey bee colonyQueen, workers and drones — three castes with different bodies, different lifespans and different jobs, two of which come from identical eggs.
- How bees communicate and find their wayThe waggle dance encodes direction and distance in a figure of eight. It is one of the most sophisticated communication systems outside human language, and it is only part of how a colony makes decisions.
- Why bees store honeyHoney is a winter fuel supply for an animal that stays awake and warm through it. Almost no other bee needs one.
- Most bees are not honey beesAround 20,000 bee species exist. Roughly 90% are solitary, almost none make honey, and most of the ones in genuine trouble are not the one on the jar.
- Why bees swarm, and what to do if you see oneA swarm is a colony reproducing, not a colony attacking. It is also the calmest a large group of honey bees ever is, and the correct response is to leave it alone and make one phone call.
Questions people ask
The rest of the bee year
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.
Plan for them
- Seasonal bee planner
It is this season and I want to do this — what should I plant?
- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?