Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

by Katherine May

A honeybee colony consists of something in the region of 30,000 to 40,000 bees – one queen, a few hundred male drones, and tens of thousands of female worker bees, plus many more eggs and larvae. The sole role of the drones is to mate with the queen early in her life, after which time she stores millions of sperm in her body and uses this to lay around 2,000 fertilised eggs per day. The workers carry out all the other tasks, working through a defined roster of roles at different stages in their lives. When they are young, they keep the hive clean, and then they graduate to a succession of other duties, depending on their experience and expendability: they tend to larvae and young bees; they look after the queen; they put nectar into the cells, make wax to produce new honeycomb, make the honey itself, and serve as guard bees. The final role of their lives is to go out foraging, because this is the most dangerous task of all, and older bees are expendable. We probably only ever see ancient bees, sent out on risky missions to gather nectar for carbs and pollen for protein. Al says that you can tell the age of a bee by the intensity of its sting – the older bees have far more potent venom. It seems only fair, given the risks they have to take. The way that bees achieve this carefully balanced social order is by behaving like cells in a larger body. ‘You or I,’ says Al, ‘have bodies that regulate themselves. We don’t even have to think about all the things that keep us alive; t...