Apart from the honeybee, practically all bees and bumblebees hibernate in a state of torpor.
Occasionally, you may come across one or two bumblebees in the cold season, when you are turning over sods in your garden, but you have to be a really keen observer to see them at all.
They keep their wings and feet pressed tightly against their bodies, and in spite of their often colorful attire you may very well mistake them for lumps of dirt.
I must add at once that these animals are what we call "queens", young females that have mated in the previous summer or autumn.
It is on them alone that the future of their race depends, for all their relatives (mothers, husbands, brothers, and unmated sisters) have perished with the arrival of the cold weather.
Even some of the queens will die before the winter is over, falling prey to enemies or disease.
The survivors emerge on some nice, sunny day in March or April, when the temperature is close to 50-degrees and there is not too much wind.
Now the thing for us to do is to find ourselves a couple of those wonderful flowering currants such as the red Ribes sanguineum of our Pacific Northwest, or otherwise a good sloe tree, or perhaps some nice pussy willow in bloom, preferably one with male or staminate catkins.
The blooms of Ribes and of the willow and sloe are the places where large numbers of our early insects will assemble: honeybees, bumblebees, and other wild bees, and also various kinds of flies.
It is a happy, buzzing crowd.

Each male willow catkin is composed of a large number of small flowers.
It is not difficult to see that the stamens of the catkin are always arranged in pairs, and that each individual flower is nothing but one such pair standing on a green, black-tipped little scale.
By scrutinizing the flowers, one can also notice that the scale bears one or two tiny warts.
Those are the nectaries or honey glands (Fig. 26, page 74).
The staminate willow catkins, then, provide their visitors with both nectar and pollen;
a marvelous arrangement, for it provides exactly what the bee queens need to make their beebread, a combination of honey and pollen with which the young of all species are fed.
The only exception to this is certain bees that have become parasites.
I will deal with these later on.

Quite often, honeybees form a majority on the willow catkins.
As we have already seen in the first chapter, bumblebees are bigger, hairier, and much more colorful than honeybees, exhibiting various combinations of black, yellow, white and orange.
Let us not try to key them out at this stage of the game, and let us just call them Bombus.
There must be several dozen species in the United States alone.
If you really insist on knowing their names, an excellent book on the North American species is Bumblebees And Their Ways by O. E. Plath.

If we manage to keep track of a Bombus queen after she has left her feeding place, we may discover the snug little hideout which she has fixed up for herself when she woke up from her winter sleep.
As befits a queen, a bumblebee female is rather choosy and may spend considerable time searching for a suitable nesting place.
Most species seem to prefer a ready-made hollow such as a deserted mouse nest, a bird house, or the hole made by a woodpecker;
some show a definite liking for making their nest in moss.
Once she has made up her mind, the queen starts out by constructing, in her chosen abode, a small "floor" of dried grass or some woolly material.
On this, she builds an "egg compartment" or "egg cell" which is filled with that famous pollen-and-nectar mixture called beebread.
She also builds one or two waxen cups which she fills with honey.
Then, a group of eggs is deposited in a cavity in the beebread loaf and the egg compartment is closed.
The queen afterward keeps incubating and guarding her eggs like a mother hen, taking a sip from time to time from the rather liquid honey in her honey pots.
When the larvae hatch, they feed on the beebread, although they also receive extra honey meals from their mother.
She continues to add to the pollen supply as needed.

The larvae, kept warm by the queen, are full grown in about ten days.
Each now makes a tough, papery cocoon and pupates.
After another two weeks, the first young emerge, four to eight small daughters that begin to play the role of worker bees, collecting pollen and nectar in the field and caring for the new young generation while the queen retires to a life of egg laying.
The first worker bees do not mate or lay eggs;
males and mating females do not emerge until later in the season.
The broods of workers that appear later tend to be bigger than the first ones, probably because they are better fed.
By the middle of the summer, many of the larvae apparently receive such a good diet that it is "optimal", and it is then that young queens begin to appear.
Simultaneously, males or drones are produced, mostly from the unfertilized eggs of workers, although a few may be produced by the queen.
The young queens and drones leave the nest and mate, and after a short period of freedom, the fertilized young queens will begin to dig in for the winter.
It is an amazing fact that in some species this will happen while the summer is still in full swing, for instance, in August.
The temperature then is still very high.
At the old nest, the queen will in the early fall cease to lay the fertilized eggs that will produce females.
As a result, the proportion of males (which leave the nest) increases, and eventually the old colony will die out completely.
The nest itself, the structure that in some cases housed about 2,000 individuals when the season was at its peak, is now rapidly destroyed by the scavenging larvae of certain beetles and moths.

Not always, though, does the development of a bumblebee colony take place in the smooth fashion we have just described.
Some members of the bee family have become idlers, social parasites that live at the expense of their hardworking relatives.
Bumblebees can thus suffer severely from the onslaughts of Psithyrus, the "cuckoo-bumblebee" as it is called in some European countries.
Female individuals of Psithyrus look deceptively like the workers and queens of the bumblebees they victimize.
The one sure way to tell victim and villain apart is to examine the hind legs which in the case of the idler, Psithyrus, lack the pollen baskets -- naturally!
The female parasite spends much time in her efforts to find a nest of her host.
When she succeeds, she usually manages to slip in unobtrusively, to deposit an egg on a completed loaf of beebread before the bumblebees seal the egg compartment.
The hosts never seem to recognize that something is amiss, so that the compartment afterward is sealed normally.
Thus, the larvae of the intruder can develop at the expense of the rightful inhabitants and the store of beebread.
Later on, they and the mother Psithyrus are fed by the Bombus workers.
Worse still, in a number of cases it has been claimed that the Psithyrus female kills the Bombus queen.

But let us return, after this gruesome interlude, to our willow catkins in the spring;
there are other wild bees that command our attention.

It is almost certain that some of these, usually a trifle smaller than the honeybees, are andrenas or mining bees.
There are about 200 different kinds of Andrena in Europe alone.
One of my favorites is A. armata, a species very common in England, where it is sometimes referred to as the lawn bee.
The females like to burrow in the short turf of well-kept lawns, where their little mounds of earth often appear by the hundreds.
Almost equal in size to a honeybee, A. armata is much more beautiful in color, at least in the female of the species: a rich, velvety, rusty red.
The males are much duller.

After having mated, an Andrena female digs a hole straight down into the ground, forming a burrow about the size of a lead pencil.
The bottom part of a burrow has a number of side tunnels or "cells", each of which is provided with an egg plus a store of beebread.
The development of the Andrena larvae is very rapid, so that by the end of spring they have already pupated and become adults.
But they are still enclosed in their larval cells and remain there throughout the summer, fall, and winter.
Their appearance, next spring, coincides in an almost uncanny way with the flowering of their host plants.
In the Sacramento valley in California, for instance, it has been observed that there was not one day's difference between the emergence of the andrenas and the opening of the willow catkins.
This must be due to a completely identical response to the weather, in the plant and the animal.

After the male and female andrenas have mated, the cycle is repeated.
Although Andrena is gregarious, so that we may find hundreds and hundreds of burrows together, we must still call it a solitary bee.
Its life history is much simpler than that of the truly colonial bumblebees and can serve as an example of the life cycle of many other species.
After all, social life in the group of the bees is by no means general, although it certainly is a striking feature.
On the basis of its life history, we like to think that Andrena is more primitive than the bumblebees.
The way in which it transports its pollen is not so perfect, either.
It lacks pollen baskets and possesses only a large number of long, branched hairs on its legs, on which the pollen grains will collect.
Still Andrena will do a reasonably good job, so that an animal with a full pollen load looks like a gay little piece of yellow down floating in the wind.

Closely related to the andrenas are the nomias or alkali bees.
Nomia melanderi can be found in tremendous numbers in certain parts of the United States west of the Great Plains, for example, in Utah and central Washington.
In the United States Department of Agriculture's Yearbook Of Agriculture, 1952, which is devoted entirely to insects, George E. Bohart mentions a site in Utah which was estimated to contain 200,000 nesting females.
Often the burrows are only an inch or two apart, and the bee cities cover several acres.
The life history of the alkali bee is similar to that of Andrena, but the first activity of the adults does not take place until summer, and the individuals hibernate in the prepupal stage.
In most places, there are two generations a year, a second brood of adults appearing late in the summer.

I must plead guilty to a special sympathy for nomias.
This may just be pride in my adopted State of Washington, but certainly I love to visit their mound cities near Yakima and Prosser in July or August, when the bees are in their most active period.
The name "alkali bee" indicates that one has to look for them in rather inhospitable places.
Sometimes, although by no means always, these are indeed alkaline.
The thing is that these bees love a fine-grained soil that is moist;
yet the water in the ground should not be stagnant either.
They dislike dense vegetation.
Where does one find such conditions?
The best chance, of course, is offered by gently sloping terrain where the water remains close to the surface and where the air is dry, so that a high evaporation leaves salty deposits which permit only sparse plant growth.