What Happens to Honey Bees in Autumn?

 How the Hive Prepares for Winter

September can be a beautiful time in the apiary.

On a warm afternoon, the entrances to our hives can still look remarkably busy. Worker bees come and go, pollen continues to arrive and, from the outside at least, life can appear much as it did during summer.

Inside the hive, however, something important is changing.

The days are getting shorter. Temperatures are beginning to fall. Many of the flowers that provided abundant nectar during summer are disappearing.

The colony knows winter is coming.

And long before we reach for our winter coats, the bees have already begun preparing for it.

From Growing to Surviving

During spring and early summer, a healthy honey bee colony has one overriding objective: grow.

The queen can lay enormous numbers of eggs, thousands of young bees are raised and the population of a strong colony can reach many tens of thousands.

All of those bees are needed.

Some care for developing brood, others build comb, guard the entrance, regulate the temperature of the hive or leave to collect the nectar and pollen needed by the colony.

By late summer and early autumn, the priorities begin to change.

There is little advantage in maintaining an enormous population when there will soon be much less food available outside.

The colony gradually switches from expansion to survival.

The queen generally begins reducing the amount of brood she produces, fewer young bees need feeding and the population starts moving towards its smaller winter size.

It is one of the many remarkable ways a honey bee colony responds to the changing seasons.

The Arrival of the Winter Bees

One of the most fascinating changes taking place at this time of year is largely invisible from outside the hive.

The colony begins producing the bees that will help carry it through winter.

These are often referred to as winter bees.

A worker bee born during the height of summer may live for only a few weeks. Her life can be extraordinarily demanding, particularly once she becomes a forager and begins making repeated flights from the hive.

Winter workers are different.

Rather than spending their lives flying backwards and forwards collecting nectar, they need to survive through months when relatively little forage may be available.

Their bodies are physiologically adapted for this very different job, allowing them to live considerably longer than their summer sisters.

These long-lived workers are enormously important.

They will help keep the colony alive through winter and, when conditions begin improving again, help care for the first new generation of bees produced as the colony starts growing towards spring.

So while an autumn hive may appear to be slowing down, it is actually creating the workforce on which its future depends.

What Happens to the Drones?

Autumn also brings a rather less comfortable change for the male bees of the colony.

Drones have an important role during the reproductive season: mating with virgin queens.

But drones do not forage for nectar or pollen, and maintaining them requires food.

As mating opportunities decline and winter approaches, keeping a large population of drones becomes an expense the colony can no longer justify.

Worker bees may begin preventing drones from accessing food and eventually force them from the hive.

It can appear brutal when you first see it.

But a honey bee colony operates as a superorganism. Its behaviour is centred on the survival of the colony rather than individual bees.

When food could become scarce, every stored drop of honey matters.

The Importance of Autumn Forage

Although the main summer nectar flows may be coming to an end, autumn certainly doesn't mean that every bee immediately stays inside.

On warm, suitable days our bees will continue flying whenever useful forage is available.

Late-flowering plants such as ivy can become particularly valuable at this time of year, alongside whatever other flowering plants are available around each apiary.

Pollen remains especially important because developing brood requires protein.

This is one of the reasons we find seasonality so fascinating.

The landscape surrounding an apiary is constantly changing.

A plant that barely attracted attention from the bees a few weeks earlier can suddenly become one of the most important sources of food available.

Honey Becomes Their Winter Pantry

To us, honey is something wonderful to spread over toast, stir into porridge or enjoy straight from the spoon.

To the bees, it is survival.

Honey is their way of preserving the abundance of spring and summer so that energy remains available when flowers disappear.

Throughout the warmer months, workers have collected nectar, reduced its moisture content and stored the resulting honey within wax cells.

Those stores now become increasingly important.

During winter there will be long periods when temperatures are too low for normal foraging. The colony must largely survive on the food it has accumulated beforehand.

This is why harvesting honey is never simply a matter of taking everything the bees have produced.

Part of responsible beekeeping is ensuring that colonies go towards winter with sufficient resources of their own.

The bees come first.

What We're Looking for in Our Apiaries

Autumn changes our job as beekeepers too.

During spring, inspections are heavily focused on colony expansion and swarm management.

During the main summer flow, we're watching available space, queen performance, brood development and honey production.

By autumn, we're thinking increasingly about winter.

When we assess our colonies, some of the questions become:

Is the colony strong enough?

Does it have sufficient food?

Is the queen still present and laying appropriately for the time of year?

Does the brood look healthy?

Are there signs of disease or excessive parasite pressure?

Does anything need addressing while the weather is still warm enough to intervene?

The exact answer can be different in every hive.

That's one of the things beekeeping teaches you very quickly: colonies don't read textbooks.

Two hives sitting only a short distance apart can behave very differently.

One may have produced a large crop of honey and still be full of bees. Another may have developed more slowly or stored less food.

Our job isn't to force every colony to behave identically.

It's to understand what we're seeing and give each colony the best possible chance of entering winter healthy and strong.

The Hive Begins to Feel Different

There is also something harder to measure about an apiary in September.

It simply feels different.

The enormous energy of May, June and July begins to soften.

There can still be wonderfully busy flying days, particularly when the sun appears and late forage is available, but there is a sense that the season is turning.

For a beekeeper, it is a reminder that successful wintering doesn't begin when the first frost arrives.

It begins now.

The health of the bees being raised during late summer and autumn, the food available to them and the condition of the colony all influence what happens months later.

Do Honey Bees Hibernate?

No.

Honey bees don't hibernate in the way many people imagine.

When cold weather eventually arrives, the colony remains alive and active inside the hive.

The bees gather together and regulate their temperature collectively, using stored honey as their energy source.

Exactly how tens of thousands of individual insects manage to survive a British winter inside a wooden box is remarkable enough to deserve an article of its own.

And that's where we'll go next in our journey through the seasons.

A Year in the Apiary

One of the reasons we love keeping bees is that there isn't really a quiet season.

The priorities simply change.

Spring is about expansion.

Summer brings enormous colony populations and honey production.

Autumn is about preparation.

And winter is about survival.

Then, almost before you realise it, the first signs of spring appear and the entire cycle begins again.

Over the coming months we'll continue sharing what is happening inside our Home Farm MK hives, including the extraordinary lives of winter bees, how we prepare colonies for colder weather and how honey bees survive winter.

Because every jar of English honey has a much bigger story behind it.

It begins with the bees.