Should bees be busy in February? Warm winters disrupt the hive life, expert says

If you happened to spot a honey bee buzzing around Spokane this February, you would be forgiven for thinking it too early in the year for their forage.

Rather than waiting for a time of year, honey bees rely on temperature cues to determine when they should begin their flights. Fifty to 55 degrees Fahrenheit tends to be the sweet spot, WSU honey bee researcher Brandon Hopkins said.

In an average year, Spokane doesn’t consistently hit a 50 -degree high until March 19, National Weather Service meteorologist Dan Butler said. February averages a high of 39 degrees in the area, though there is often a lot of variability between the first and 28th of the month.

This year, February’s average high was 42 degrees – three higher than average, while nights were just over 5 degrees warmer on average.

“It’s very early for bees to be out flying around and that can be difficult for the colony,” Hopkins said. “Especially if there’s not a lot of resources available in terms of flowers for those bees to get.”

In the Eastern Washington area, a healthy colony might require as much as 60 pounds of honey to survive the winter, Hopkins said. Often, a single generation of workers remains active in the hive, vibrating their wings to keep temperatures stable for themselves and developing larvae.

Once the outside temperature signals to the bees that it is time to forage, worker mortality increases as bees are killed outside or work themselves to death. Though workers may live for months over the winter season, a foraging bee’s lifespan is only 13 days, Hopkins said.

But flowers don’t rely on temperature alone, in the way that bees largely do. Plants often also take into account the available light in an environment, University of Washington researcher Takato Imaizumi recently said in UW News.

“If those flights when the bees are going out looking for food – if there’s not a lot of flowers in the environment at that time, then the colony gets nothing back to replace those foragers when they die,” Hopkins said. “So they need pollen to be coming in so that they can have the food resources to raise the next generation of bees.”

It is typical for honey bee colonies to experience a “spring dwindling,” but the earlier in the season they come out, the longer they have to manage high resource use and low return. A drop in temperature after a few days of early -season warmth can also result in brood death and the associated waste of resources that had gone into the larvae.

Honey bees have a leg up on wild bees and wasps when it comes to tackling early-season resource scarcity though – their human keepers supplement them with extra food. Additionally, commercial colonies are increasingly being stored indoors over the winter to mitigate population loss.

Keeping pollinators stable is only half the battle when dealing with changing temperatures in the agricultural world though, Hopkins said. Traditionally, mid-February to mid-March sees the nation’s bees shipped to California for almond pollination. Then, beekeepers have a little bit of time to truck the bees up to Washington to pollinate newly mature fruit trees, including cherries, apricots and apples.

“The effect of these warm springs on agriculture could be that that window gets pushed up,” he said. “It may be that there is a shortage of colonies because they can’t get out of California fast enough to get into tree fruit if the bloom started in mid-March.”

Large -scale pollinator management is a human issue, though. To help honey bees manage early -season scarcity, Hopkins suggests maintaining plants that grow in the early season such as snowdrops in home gardens.