What bees do in winter
One species clusters and shivers its way through; every other bee here is either underground or dead.
Bees and plants in winter
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.
December to February · 71 plants in flower · 41 bees on the wing
The best winter plants for bees
Almost nothing flowers, which is exactly why what does is worth planting. A garden's value is limited by its worst month.
The honey bee colony
The colony forms a tight cluster and generates heat by shivering its flight muscles, maintaining perhaps 20 °C at the edge and over 30 °C at the core where brood rearing restarts in January. Bees rotate between the cold outside of the cluster and the warm centre. The whole arrangement runs on stored honey — a British colony consumes roughly 20 to 25 kg over a winter — and it is precisely this that makes honey worth taking a surplus of. The colony does not hibernate: it stays awake, warm and metabolically active in the middle of a freezing hive, and on a mild day above about 10 °C bees will fly for cleansing flights and for any winter forage available.
Bumblebees
Nothing above ground, in most species. Mated queens are in hibernation in small chambers a few centimetres down, having spent the autumn building fat reserves. A significant exception has developed in southern Britain and parts of western Europe: buff-tailed bumblebee colonies now overwinter actively in urban areas, foraging on winter-flowering garden shrubs, which is a genuine and recent change in behaviour driven by warmer cities and by planting.
Solitary bees
All in the nest as larvae or pre-pupae, sealed in cells provisioned the previous summer. They will not emerge until spring, and the timing of that emergence is temperature-cued — which is one of the mechanisms by which a warming climate can decouple a specialist bee from the plant it depends on.
What actually helps in winter
Winter-flowering plants, for the surprising number of bees that fly on mild days: winter honeysuckle, mahonia, hellebore, winter aconite, snowdrop, winter clematis and ivy where it is still in flower. And, again, leaving things alone — the stems, the litter, the undisturbed soil. There is no January bee-gardening task that beats not doing anything.
What this group covers
12 of 12 months have something in flower. Nectar and pollen are counted separately and a month counts only where at least one plant offers that resource at moderate value or better — a plant in flower is not the same as a plant worth visiting.
| Month | In flower | Nectar | Pollen |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 47 | Yes | Yes |
| February | 55 | Yes | Yes |
| March | 44 | Yes | Yes |
| April | 27 | Yes | Yes |
| May | 14 | Yes | Yes |
| June | 8 | Yes | Yes |
| July | 8 | Yes | Yes |
| August | 8 | Yes | Yes |
| September | 12 | Yes | Yes |
| October | 21 | Yes | Yes |
| November | 35 | Yes | Yes |
| December | 44 | Yes | Yes |
What to plant for winter
Honeys harvested in winter
Northern-hemisphere harvest windows from the honey records. A harvest window is when a flow is taken off, which is later than the flowering that produced it.
- Ethiopian white honeyClean, sweet and faintly herbal, with a smooth dense texture that dominates the impression more than the flavour does.
- Almond blossom honeyDistinctly bitter with a marzipan aroma over it — one of the few honeys where bitterness arrives before sweetness, and an acquired taste even among people who like bitter honeys.
- Tajonal honeyBright and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint herbal edge — an approachable honey and the backbone of Mexico's export trade.
- Campanilla honeyLight and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint tropical fruit note — approachable and pleasant rather than distinctive.
- Logwood honeyLight and clean with a distinct floral sweetness and a faint caramelised note — one of the more delicate Caribbean honeys.
- Huisache honeyStrongly floral with a distinct violet and orange-blossom perfume over warm caramel — one of the most obviously perfumed American honeys.
- Red maple honeyWarm and lightly caramelised with a faint woody note — a straightforward honey, and one that surprises people expecting it to taste of maple syrup.
- Longan honeyIntensely aromatic — caramel, dried tropical fruit and a distinctive musky floral note that is unlike anything in the European catalogue.
- Mustard honeyVery sweet and very mild with a faint pungent brassica note when fresh, fading to clean blandness as it ages and sets.
The rest of the 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 the season
- 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?