Nature Blog #9

Beneath Ottawa’s Snow: The Queen Bumblebee’s Winter

By Celeste Reisinger | Original Capturz

As Ottawa’s days shorten and the garden begins to fade, it is easy to imagine that the bumblebees have simply disappeared. The flowers grow quiet. Frost edges the leaves. Soon, snow will cover the places where summer was so busy.

For a young queen bumblebee, this is the beginning of a remarkable season of survival.

In the usual bumblebee life cycle, the queen preparing for winter is one of the new queens produced during the warmer months. As the colony’s season ends, the founding queen, workers and males die. The newly mated queens carry the possibility of next year’s colonies. Each must now survive the cold on her own.

Before settling into winter shelter, a young queen feeds to build the energy reserves her body will need for months without flowers. Those final blossoms matter. Ottawa’s native asters and goldenrods offer valuable late-season food, helping turn the last colour in our gardens into a chance of survival. Her small body becomes its own winter pantry.

She also needs somewhere to spend the cold months. Often, she burrows into soil and settles into a small underground chamber. Loose soil and the shelter of fallen leaves can provide valuable habitat. The precise places queens choose vary, and scientists are still learning about this hidden part of their lives.

Once settled, she enters a dormant state called diapause, often described as hibernation. Her metabolism slows dramatically, conserving her stored energy. Through an Ottawa winter, her task is to endure until conditions allow her to emerge again. She spends this period alone.

As a photographer, I find something deeply moving about the part of her story that happens beyond the camera. We notice the bee balanced on a flower, the pollen dusting her body, the light touching her wings. Her winter survival takes place almost entirely out of sight.

That gives us a reason to look differently at autumn cleanup. Leaving fallen leaves in garden beds and beneath shrubs helps preserve winter shelter. Keeping some soil undisturbed protects places where queens may have settled. A quiet corner allowed to remain a little untidy can have a purpose we never see.

When spring conditions become suitable, surviving queens emerge and search for flowers. Each nest-founding queen must then find a home, lay her first eggs and gather food for her young. Until her first workers mature, she manages the beginning of a colony herself. The timing depends on the species and the season.

When the garden falls quiet this autumn, I like to think of a young queen tucked somewhere beneath it, waiting through the cold.

Next spring’s familiar bumble may begin in a patch of earth we choose to leave alone today.

I'm amazed...are you?