What bees do in winter
One species clusters and shivers its way through; every other bee here is either underground or dead.
Honey bees
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.
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
- Dwarf honey beeApis floreaEusocial, colony survives the winter
- Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisEusocial, colony dies each autumn
- Early bumblebeeBombus pratorumEusocial, colony dies each autumn
Solitary bees flying now
7in 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.
- 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.
- Orchid beesEuglossiniKeystone pollinators of neotropical forest. Their long tongues open up deep flowers nothing else can reach, and their range links widely scattered individual trees. Around 700 orchid species depend on male euglossine bees exclusively for pollination, attaching pollen packets to the bee while it collects perfume and offering no nectar reward at all — a pure deception system built entirely on the perfume behaviour. Brazil nut trees are the best-known economic case: they require large-bodied euglossine and related bees, and the crop cannot be grown in plantations without them.
- Wallace's giant beeMegachile plutoUnknown in any detail. As a very large megachilid it presumably pollinates forest plants effectively, but no study has established which ones or how much it matters.
- Blue orchard beeOsmia lignariaOutstanding on tree fruit — almond, apple, cherry, pear and plum. Per individual it moves several times more pollen than a honey bee, and it flies at temperatures and in light rain that ground honey bees entirely. Its commercial deployment in almonds is a direct response to the risk of a cold wet February.
- Hairy-footed flower beeAnthophora plumipesAn important early pollinator of deep spring flowers — lungwort, comfrey, dead-nettle, rosemary, primrose — where its long tongue lets it feed legitimately rather than rob. It flies in cooler weather than honey bees and starts weeks earlier.
- Horned mason beeOsmia cornutaAn outstanding orchard pollinator, managed commercially for almond, apple, pear, cherry and plum across southern Europe. Per individual it moves several times more pollen than a honey bee.
- Blue-banded beeAmegillaOutstanding on buzz-pollinated crops and wild flora. Australian research has trialled them for glasshouse tomato pollination as an alternative to importing bumblebees, which Australia has kept out for biosecurity reasons.
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?