Winter Survival for Honeybees: The Unique Strategy of Honeybee Colonies

There are a whole host of species on earth that evolved to spend the wintertime, when food and habitable weather is scarce, hibernating safely in a warm space somewhere. Almost all bees do the same… All except the honeybee. The honeybee evolved to do something similar but not entirely the same.

Everybody knows that honeybees make honey, but not everybody knows that they are the only species of bee to do it. It’s true that the bumblebee creates a very weak sort of honey that it stores to feed it’s young through the warm seasons, but when the days get shorter, and the weather turns cold, freshly mated female bumblebees go off to hibernate whilst the rest of the nest accept their fate and dies.

Bumblebees have small nests & do not store honey (Credit Bumblebee Conservation Trust)

The honeybee colony, however, has a different approach. They have diligently spent the spring and summer months collecting and storing surplus honey. Alongside this, they have collected pollen to mix with honey to form a kind of bee bread that they store alongside the honey in the wax comb built throughout the hive.

As they approach the end of Autumn, the queen will start to lay the eggs that will grow to become the winter bees. These winter bees will need to be healthy and well fed as, unlike the summer bees who live for around six weeks, they’ll need to last right up until the start of spring, when the queen will start to lay again.

If the bees have chosen a thick tree to inhabit, then the temperature inside can be maintained at a comfortable level for them by vibrating their flight muscles to generate heat. If the weather does get particularly cold though, they have a final strategy for keeping the queen and thus the colony alive. They cluster tightly, similarly to penguins in the artic, so that the outer bees take on the harsh outer temperature while the centre is maintained at the required temperature for survival.

If all goes well, as spring arrives, the winter bees begin to forage for fresh nectar and pollen as the new generation of workers are laid and raised inside the hive. The process begins all over again.

Honeybee starvation kills the entire colony at once

So why do some colonies not make it through winter?

Winter poses several challenges for honeybee colonies, and the most obvious and dangerous one is a lack of food. If the bees haven’t managed to gather and store enough honey, a long and cold winter—or a wet one in Manchester!—can exhaust their stores before spring arrives. Generating the heat they need to survive uses up a lot of energy, and if the honey runs out, the whole colony risks starvation. For a beekeeper, few things are more disheartening than opening a hive in early spring to find a pile of lifeless bees on the hive floor.

So how can beekeepers help their bees through winter? The answer is simple: by respecting the bees' hard work and leaving enough of their honey behind. Here at Manchester Honey Company, we make sure to leave our bees with more than enough honey for the winter, so they have everything they need to stay healthy without relying on cheap sugar syrups, which can dilute the purity of the honey. This does mean our harvests are smaller and our product slightly more expensive, but we believe it’s a fair price for the purest honey and the healthiest, happiest bees.

Honeybees storing honey in open honeycomb cells.