The secret life of honeybees in winter

The myths, the realities, and the science

Hello everyone!

I think it’s a good time to start off with a fresh ‘beekeeping’ slate with you all, because I’ll (hopefully!) be starting up two new colonies in April, and I’d like to share the journey (due to popular demand).

it’s me!

So, right now, it’s January in Belgium. We had lots of snow for a week or so there, but now it’s milder and I can already see some of the bulbs I planted sprouting up through the soil to sniff the air.

So what is a beekeeper to do?

Bees hibernate …is a common misconception

They don’t hibernate or die or fly south for the winter (yes seriously, someone asked me that once. I know there’s no stupid questions, I guess, but….). Given that honeybees cold-blooded creatures, this is remarkable. All winter, they’re still in there, awake in the beehive, alive.

Winter is what honey is for, after all: its the honeybees’ food stockpile. It’s their lifeline to spring.

So how do honeybees spend the winter months if they’re not dead? Well: in a big ball curled up around the queen bee.

The clustered colony is not a uniform ‘ball’ of bees. It has two distinct layers. The outer layer is termed the mantle and is very tightly packed with bees facing inwards. These bees are packed in so tightly that their hairy bodies trap air between them, effectively forming an insulating quilt. To reduce heat loss further these mantle bees have a countercurrent heat exchanger (between the abdomen and the thorax) that reduces heat loss from the haemolymph circulating through their projecting abdomens. Inside the mantle is the core. This is less densely occupied by bees, meaning that they have space to move around for essential activities such as brood rearing or feeding. - The Apiarist

The bee ball itself looks a bit like this:

This is a picture of a ‘heat ball’, but they look similar. Bees heat ball the queen bee, if/when necessary, if they collectively decide that she’s no longer capable of performing her duties.  This is a topic for a whole different email to be honest, but this practice is sometimes called “cuddle death”. Image source.

Honeybees in winter are built differently to bees born any other time of the year

The ‘winter bees’ are laid by the queen bee in the autumn: they have an extra big ‘fat body’, which makes them better suited for the hard months ahead. Because of this difference in their physiology, they’re even considered a whole separate caste of bees - unique from the three main castes: workers, drones, and queen.

Yes, honeybees have castes. Because of course they fricken do.

So how does a colony start making winter bees? Just like with ‘building’ a queen bee (the famous royal jelly), it begins with what they’re fed as larvae.

The bee larvae that hatch in summer get plenty of pollen, which is rich in protein. But the ones that hatch out in autumn are fed a low-protein diet.

This makes them grow a bigger ‘fat body’, a unique organ in insects that controls their metabolism and makes vitellogenin, a wonderful compound that boosts their immunity and longevity.

This is how the winter bees can survive for 6 months, while the summer bees only last for 6 weeks. WTF, right?

The tasks of a beekeeper in winter include…

In March, spring is in the land, and the bees start streaming out of the hive as the weather gets warmer. It really is a miraculous sight, and one that never loses its shine for me - it makes me think of all those birth/rebirth myths, the wheel of the year, the resurrection of Christ, all those stories. It’s evident, right there in my garden. Folklore made real. It’s amazing.

I spend the winter fussing and stressing -are my bees alive? That is the question, every day. I know that some people use a stethoscope against the side of the beehive, just to see if they can hear any stirrings of life inside it in wintertime. I keep meaning to buy a cheap one, just to assuage my own nervous brain windmills.

So, you’d be forgiven for thinking that as a beekeeper you can just spend the winter sitting around playing The Sims 4 or whatever, waiting for March for the bees to get their shit together. But no. Winter tasks are dirty and many and include:

• Cleaning out dead hives (see below)

• Maintaining your equipment

• Cleaning your equipment.

• Melting down beeswax to make new frame foundations

• Gently treating the bees for varroa (the subject of another email) and feeding them extra supplementary food if necessary

Milder winters aren’t actually easier for honeybees

You would kind of think that if it’s a bit of a milder winter, it would be easier on the bees. But this mismatch in seasonal timing is dangerous for bees.

If it begins to warm up, they will naturally start to leave the hive to forage, but there isn’t really any pollen and nectar for them in winter months. So, they waste energy for no reason, coming home both empty-handed and even more hungry.

A good, cold, proper winter is what honey bees are engineered for. They're engineered by nature especially for this rebirth kind of miracle, to be honest.

In fact, as the climate warms, temperatures rise and winters become milder, scientists are trying to replicate ‘natural’ winter conditions by setting beehives in cold storage. This has a positive effect, economically, for the commercial pollination industry, which I not something I like, but… some people will try and wrest the very last penny out of every creature on this planet if they could. Read more about this here: Helping Honey Bees Make It Through Winter With Early Cold Storage.

The dead beehive that I had to clean up

TRIGGER WARNING: This is what it looks like when you are an irresponsibly distracted beekeeper with a baby. This is what it looks like when your hive dies. It's ants on parasites (wax moth larvae) on parasites (varroa mites).

Gross. Bugs on bugs on bugs. Let me tell you, pro tip, when you are cleaning out something that disgusting, it really helps to be listening to an audio book and, obviously, to have latex gloves on. Because it was not the high point of my career as a beekeeper.

I had to pull it all out with my tools and (gloved) hands and then burn the whole insides of the hives to eradicate any harmful microbes.

Do you see these grooves in the wood? They’re from the wax moth larvae. They really dig in there, don't they? I mean, it looks like somebody took a pen knife to it or something.

Wax moth larvae grooves

A sidenote on wax moths: they ‘eat’ plastic

Recently, scientists have kind of figured out, like, “hey! if we could get something that would eat plastic, that would be great! Oh, wait look!”

European researchers have found that the saliva of wax moth larvae can break down the most common type of plastic, polyethylene. They identified two enzymes that can break apart the plastic's long polymers into smaller chains. Read more: Wax moth caterpillar spit could be used to break down plastic waste

“We can harness the amazingly destructive power of the wax moth to tackle plastic pollution!”

And the entire beekeeping world turned around and went: …ah yeah sure we’ve known they destroy plastic this whole time, lads. We’ve been cleaning up after these freaks for years.

This is because, as the wax moth ‘eats through’ plastic, you always have to be careful about storing frames in the wintertime. If there's wax moth there, they'll start destroying any plastic supports that are holding your frames. They even wreck their ways through plastic bags if you ignore them.

Thanks for reading!

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Reminder: Fake Breakdown Crafts is open again and you can buy weavings, altered tins, and zines there. New products added in a slow-made, low key kind of way.

Love,

Jessica