Towards Winter Rest: A Field Study in Resilience
What Twelve Years of Beekeeping Taught Me About Buffers, Succession, and Hidden Hinges
In this letter I explore:
The unseen moment when a colony’s fate is sealed
Fat bodies, vitellogenin, and why some bees live six months
July pollen, not winter sugar, as the key to survival
Designing landscapes that support resilience
What human lives might learn from the architecture of the hive
I’m doing some deep-diving into the concept of resilience, and ways to increase resilience in our everyday lives. In previous writings I’ve explored mental preparation through Stoic practice and Systems Thinking, and succession as a way to embrace change and uncertainty.
The concept of resilience connects with many other ideas that populate my mind. Modest self-sufficiency. Simple living. Agency. Complexity. Adaptation. Ecology.
To use the words of Thoreau:
“Direct your eye sight inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered.
Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.”
This is the strength of journaling: every thought written down becomes part of a map, forming the constellation of one’s thoughts. All we have to do is connect those dots and reveal their practical use in everyday life.
Today I want to talk about bees. I’m a beekeeper in my spare time, and I’m fascinated by those little, productive creatures. Learning about bees means learning about living organisms, systems, democracy and sustainability. And last but not least, the bees taught me some important lessons on practical, applied resilience.
Let’s head out into the clearing of my little woodlot. An open circle surrounded by birches, walnuts and wild cherries. Underneath those trees: my hives.
The Collapse
I’ve been beekeeping for over 12 years now. One of my main beekeeping philosophies is to keep the bees as naturally as possible.
Natural beekeeping means not using any conventional treatment or chemicals against diseases. It means trusting the bees to adapt, and find their own way to health. And winter survival. They have a name for that now: Darwinian beekeeping. Less interference, less stress, stronger bees: that was my adagio, too.
Now here’s the thing that might surprise some.
The non-treatment actually worked very well…for some time.
For more than ten years, around 80% of my hives survived winter. Some winters, I even lost no hives at all. That’s better than most of the beekeepers in my area, who treated heavily for mites and still lost more.
I grew confident. No more research. No more evaluations. I firmly believed that my workflow had turned into a mature, fully developed system. There was nothing left to be improved upon.
Of course, in hindsight the flaw seems obvious. In nature, as is our own lives, there is no such thing as a final destination - a climax-vegetation. Fixed and stable system are an illusion. There is only a circle of ever-incarnating change.
And thus: two bad years came.
Last year I wintered five hives. By spring, only one was alive. The others were silent boxes: no buzz, no warmth, just a faint smell of wax and decay.
Suffice to say, with the collapse of my colonies, the belief in my dearly trusted beekeeping system collapsed as well.
The Search for the Hinge
So I started to retrace my previous steps. I had to replace emotional panicking with objective and rational research. What could have gone wrong?
That’s when I stumbled back upon the cyclical nature of beekeeping and the importance of seasons.
There is a common wisdom in beekeeping, that defines late autumn and winter as the most crucial moments for bee survival. Indeed, it is in those periods that most colonies wither. Make sure your bees have enough syrup, they would say, enough stores to survive winter. And, of course, keep varroa down - that little annoying, parasitic mite. Then: Cross your fingers.
These old truths are stubborn and tend to stick around. Max Planck formulated that idea rather clearly:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
So I had followed the conventional wisdom in my own way. I fed the bees when needed. I had left honey for them. The colonies didn’t starve.
Yet they still died.
I figured autumn couldn’t be the problem. Nor winter. In our regions, spring provides plenty of food sources, and I could always observe a healthy, exponential growth of the hives.
I guess it’s of typical human nature to equate the crisis moment with the critical moment. Bees die in winter, so winter must be the culprit. I’m a freelancer. If I have no work today, it probably means, I didn’t do enough prospecting in the months before. If a relationship ends, the final argument might be the tipping point, but the root of the problem is probably to be found somewhere along the road. And, the position we are in now - all our knowledge, skills, ideas - are an accumulation of our past endeavors.
We have to fill-up the stocks and buffers we need on time. Be prepared. That’s a core fundament of resilience.
So I came to understand: for the bees, the hinge of the year is neither winter nor spring.
It is July: when the first winter bees are born.
The Guardians: Winter Bees
One morning, late in the season, I noticed bees at the hive entrance that looked different. Bigger. Heavier. Slower. They seemed almost clumsy compared to the slim, fast workers of spring.
These are the winter bees. Guardians of the hive’s future.
These fat bees are not just overweight versions of the summer kind. They are a different creature entirely, physiologically distinct.
The big difference between winter and summer bees is their lifespan. Summer workers live three weeks on average. Winter bees, however, can live up to six months.
Isn’t that fascinating to know that, depending on the seasons, there are different kinds of worker bees?
Let’s take a look at this fat body. It is essentially a sort of liver-pantry combo, where lipids and proteins are stored and which serves as a filter to detoxify poisons. An important protein stored there is called vitellogenin. It boosts the immune system and extends their lives.
Here’s where everything interconnects. Varroa mites don’t suck bee blood, as was once believed. Instead, they feed directly on the fat body itself, sucking out proteins and, with them, longevity itself.
A recent study showed that winter bees fly as often as spring bees, and sometimes longer than summer bees, whenever the weather allows. They are guardians in every sense: holding the line through cold, then charging forward at the first thaw.
Without them, forget winter survival.
This is what resilience looks like at the cellular level: not just surviving, but storing enough capacity to remain active, responsive, alive. The fat body is a buffer. Vitellogenin is a reserve. Winter bees are what happens when a system successfully prepares for scarcity while resources are still abundant.
The Architects: Summer Bees
But guardians don’t appear from nowhere. They are raised by architects: the summer bees.
This is the fascinating story of exponential growth and the different synergies inside the hive.
In early spring, after the harsh conditions of winter, the colony has dwindled. The bees have to start building up their numbers again. Fast growth is important, as the honey flow is starting soon. For that growth to happen, one old winter bee may feed four or five larvae. The result is smaller, short-lived summer workers. They live fast and burn out quickly, foraging until their wings fray.
But as the queen lays ferociously, the ratio flips. Suddenly, there are more nurses than larvae. Four or five of them might be frantically feeding and taking care of one little larva. Each larva gets fed pollen and honey abundantly.
And out of this surplus come the robust bees of late June and July: the first winter generation.
This is succession at the smallest scale. Each generation building what the next will need. Summer bees raising winter bees, who will in turn raise next summer’s bees. A perfect cycle, fragile and resilient at once.
This is the hive’s secret climax. Everyone knows the drama of May swarms, the hive bursting like a subway at rush hour, spilling into the sky. But the second climax is quieter: the production of winter bees. Without this climax, no colony survives.
Now, lets talk about nutrition. Bees don’t only need honey, they also need pollen. Pollen is the bees’ superfood, filled with good stuff: proteins, lipids, vitamins, sterols, minerals, and micronutrients. A colony consumes 20–50 kilograms of pollen per year. That’s the equivalent of carrying home fifty supermarket bags packed to the brim with nothing but pollen.
The Hinge: July and August Nutrition
Here lies the beekeeper’s true work: understanding the hinge.
In July, nurse bees need to have access to fresh pollen to feed the next generation of bees.
If the bees raised in July are fat and healthy, the colony has a chance. If they are thin, underfed, or nourished on sugars only, the game is lost before the leaves fall.
We harvest honey, the bees’ winter pantry, and replace it with sugar syrup. Yet, a bee’s diet is not so different from ours. Our health, too, is dependent on the availability of all three macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Needless to say, the same goes for the bees.
Sugar syrup in late summer and autumn? That’s simply not enough. Syrup provides carbs only. It is fuel. It keeps wings beating, allowing foragers to fly another day. However, strong bees need proteins. What builds winter bees, then, is pollen.
Stored pollen ferments into what we call beebread. It’s the equivalent of sauerkraut in our own pantries. It stores well, providing a reliable stock of food when fresh produce is unavailable. But if I have the option, I’d choose a crunchy cabbage straight from the garden. Bees are the same: they prefer fresh pollen brought in by the foragers, loaded with micronutrients and proteins.
We can clearly observe what a pollen shortage does to the bees. The hive begins to cannibalize its own brood, lifespans shrink, immune systems weaken. Once a protein deficiency has set in, the colony stops rearing new brood. When that happens, we’re too late. Feeding doesn’t help. The hive cannot recover quickly enough, and winter survival is unlikely.
Researchers observed that pollen is always stored close to the brood nest, so nurse bees can reach it immediately to build their fat bodies. Another recent work shows that natural pollen diets help bees detoxify pesticides.
The Importance of Landscapes
After I learned all of this I decided to rework my garden. If I want to have healthy colonies, I need to have healthy fat winter bees, and they must be fed late in summer with as much fresh pollen as possible.
So I added some late blooming trees: Heptacodium and Koelreuteria in the garden. And lime trees in the woodlot. I started sowing cover crops in my empty vegetable plots: borage, buckwheat, phacelia and other late blooming annuals. And here’s another easy one: I stopped mowing the grass late in season, letting white clover bloom. Hedges: wild. Verges: uncut.
Indeed, landscapes do matter. Let me add a small observation from C.C. Miller’s Fifty Years Among the Bees from 1911, where he observes that bees are carrying pollen whenever it is warm enough and: I am always watching the patches of white clover along the roadside.
Clover used to be one of the most important crops for the bees in late summer. In my region it was integral part of the landscapes - roadsides and meadows. But where is that clover now? I can only spot eternally mowed verges, grass-dominated pasture and endless fields of maize.
And to make the bridge: where do we get our pollen from? What are we feeding ourselves in those abundant months that will carry us through scarcity?
Are we building fat bodies: reserves of energy, knowledge, relationships, creative capacity? Or are we merely burning sugar, tending to our day to day businesses on auto-pilot, waiting for disaster to struck?
The landscape shapes our possibilities. Our environments, whether physical, social, or professional, determine what reserves we can build. Sometimes resilience isn’t only an internal practice. It’s also designing surroundings that make survival possible.
Between Wild and Tame
For a long time, I thought of bees as a piece of wildness I could host in my garden. Untamed, mysterious, part of nature. Let them do their thing, and all will be good was my line of thinking. Others around me spoke of them as livestock, units of production, colonies to be managed and manipulated like cattle.
Today, for me, neither view feels right.
Bees exist somewhere in between. They are not truly wild anymore: we’ve bred them, carried them across continents, cultivated their lines, pressed them into boxes, even dictated when they may or may not swarm. Yet I would not call them livestock either. You can’t fence them in. You can’t keep them on a leash. Every day they leave the hive and roam the fields, the orchards, the forests, gathering what they choose.
This “in-betweenness” is the true nature of beekeeping.
It also challenges both extremes. The purist natural beekeeper, who insists honeybees belong only to untouched wilderness, forgets that honeybees have been shaped by centuries of cultivation. The industrial beekeeper, who treats bees as cattle, forgets they remain free creatures, roaming and choosing, vulnerable to landscapes and climates we cannot control.
So to keep bees well is to hold this tension. Not to cage them, not to abandon them. To tend them in that fertile middle space, between cultivation and wildness.
To me, that’s what good husbandry is all about.
Perhaps this applies more broadly. We are neither fully autonomous nor entirely determined. Not wild, not domesticated. We design our lives within constraints we didn’t choose. We adapt to systems we cannot fully control. The art is in the tending: the daily practice of working with what we have, preparing for what might be, without pretending we can truly control either.
Maurice Maeterlinck - in his ‘The Life of Bees’ - saw it clearly over a century ago:
...and the bees, like ourselves, obey the nameless lord of the wheel that incessantly turns on itself, and crushes the wills that have set it in motion.
Lessons from the Apiary
It’s early in the morning. I’m in the orchard. A cool, orange sun is slowly ascending between the poplars. The advent of winter lurking around the corner. Yet it is still suspiciously mild. A carpet of leaves on the ground mixed with late, fallen apples. I look around. Weeds still grow whether I pull them or not. Piles of logs waiting to be split. In the shed: boxes of harvested beeswax that need to be processed.
I used to feel overwhelmed by all the work, but not anymore. The weeds will be back. The logs will still be there tomorrow. Processing beeswax can wait until winter. The garden doesn’t mind.
The bees, too, always have work waiting. They don’t complain. Even in winter they keep on going, clustered, rotating, heating with their wing muscles.
And here lies the lesson beyond beekeeping.
Sugar is fuel. Pollen is nourishment. We too need both. Quick energy to get through the day, and deeper sustenance to carry us through seasons.
We live like summer bees: frantic, burning out. Forgetting to build our reserves. Maybe the bees are telling us something: balance. Expansion and conservation. Growth and rest.
And this: the season that feels abundant is when we build for scarcity. July matters more than November. The hinge is hidden. The critical moment often looks ordinary.
My system collapsed because I misidentified the hinge. I watched autumn and winter carefully, but ignored summer. I fed sugar when I should have been ensuring pollen. I measured survival by whether colonies made it through February, not whether they entered October already doomed.
Now I know: resilience is built in the margins we overlook, the quiet seasons, the moments that don’t feel urgent. It’s built when things are going well, not when they’ve already fallen apart.
This is what the bees taught me. This is what the field teaches, if we pay attention.
The hive hums on. Tomorrow, I’ll check the stores again. But for now, I let the work wait. The garden doesn’t mind. The bees know what to do.
In the Archive
This node connects to:
On Succession: Letting Your Garden Grow Wild
On Resilience and the Art of Balance
Informed by the observations of:
Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901) · C.C. Miller’s Fifty Years Among the Bees (1911) · Randy Oliver’s Fat Bees series (Scientific Beekeeping) · Bernhard Heuvel’s Bienen im Kopf (2020)
Historic and contemporary beekeepers.
They all found that survival depends on preparation, not control.
Other consulted sources:
Amdam, G.V. et al. (2003). Social reversal of immunosenescence in honey bee workers. PNAS, 100(14), 7617–7622.
Brodschneider, R., & Crailsheim, K. (2010). Nutrition and health in honey bees. Apidologie, 41(3), 278–294.
Minaud, E., Rebaudo, F. & Requier, F. (2025) Long-lived winter honey bees show unexpectedly high levels of flight activity compared to short-lived summer bees. Apidologie 56, 16
Ramsey, S.D. et al. (2019). Varroa destructor feeds primarily on honey bee fat body tissue and not hemolymph. PNAS, 116(5).
Tend the Hinge
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