Larry Rockwell, age 9, of Hamilton, New York,.for his question:
Why are there no bees around in the winter?
When you think of bees, chances are you think of flowers. The two of them go together. The bees and the flowers depend upon each other and need each other. Most fragile flowers .cannot abide the cold. Plants do not blossom in wintry weather. So the bees that need the flowers stay indoors until the flowery days of spring.
Some people think that all the bees perish when Jack Frost touches the wintry world with his icy fingers. It is true that many of the bees do perish in the fall. But not all of them. Many tuck themselves away inside the hive and try to keep warm and comfortable through the chilly winter months. They do not hibernate like the woodchuck and other animals that spend the winter in deep, deep sleep. The busy bees stay busy all winter and when spring arrives, they are ready to start their busy trips out into the fields and gardens.
A bee hive is really a big family of bees all living together in a comfortable home that they made for themselves. The queen bee is the mother of all the other bees. She stays indoors all the time and spends her summers laying eggs that will hatch into new members of the family. The bees we see buzzing among the flowers are her daughters, out shopping for pollen and nectar from the leafy plants. They gather the groceries to feed the family and other materials to repair the hive. In the fall, the busy workers gather extra supplies to tide them through the bleak winter days ahead.
They fill the waxy combs in the hive with extra stores of honey. They seal the drafty cracks and make their home watertight with layers of wax. The queen stops laying eggs and no baby bees are born. Many of the worker bees die and the drone bees are pushed outdoors to perish in the cold. There are fewer bees in the winter hive. Through the summer, maybe there were 50,000 bees, workers and nursemaids, drones and growing children. _In winter perhaps 10,000 bees are left in the hive.
With their queen mother, the wintering bees work hard to stay alive. The honey in the pantry is rationed and each little bee, iven the queen bee, gets only his fair share of the food. Insects cannot abide the cold and most other winged insects perish when winter comes.' Even the honeybees feel the cold inside their cozy hive. So they bundle their small, furry bodies together in a big, round ball. That way they keep each other warm, just warm enough to stay alive. In this wintry month of February, the bees that visited your summer garden are tucked away in their hive, huddled together in a furry, round ball. The bees on the inside, naturally, are warmest. But the furry little animals are always fair to each other. From time to time, the bees inside the ball crawl up and give the bees on the chilly out side a chance to creep down and get warm.
Each little bee sips so much and no more than her share of honey from the comb. There is some royal jelly food for the queen mother, but perhaps not enough to last her all winter. When all her favorite food is gone, she too sips a little honey from the combs. In summer, her food is brought to her and served by her daughters. In winter, she may go to the pantry herself. And on a warm, sunny winter's day, a few daring workers may take short trips outdoors just in case there are a few flowers to be found.