To beekeeper and author of the book "The Natural Beekeeper", Ross Conrad, I asked “Are bees light sensitive in their emergence behavoir, and thus missing the right time to wake up? I thought they were warmth sensitive, and woke up based on hive temperatures. If so, why are the blossums here but not the bees?
Conrad said “Bees require both adequate light and warmth in order to forage. It is widely held that they utilize the sun for navigational purposes, and they require warmth in order to maintain a high enough body temperature so that their flight muscles will work and not become immobilized. When temperatures fall to around 57 degrees F, the bees will tend to cluster around the brood and queen in order to keep them warm, and this will restrict the colonies flight activity (the exact temperature varies among bee hives depending on race, genetics, etc.) I suspect that you are not seeing the bees you expect because the mild winter and unusually warm weather during the past couple months has fooled the plants into blossoming muchsooner than usual (everything seems to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule). Now that the temperatures have returned to what is considered seasonably "normal" it is often too cold for the bees to fly. This especially true for hives that are kept in shaded areas and do not get a lot of direct sunlight inhibiting their ability to warm up enough to send out a lot of foragers during the day. Other factors come into play as well...as the plants have to have the right soil, light, and moisture conditions (among others) to be able to produce the nectar they need to bribe the pollinators into visiting their blossoms. It does not matter how big and beautiful a flower is, if there is no reward for a visiting bee, the bee will go elsewhere.
Of course in your particular area, it may be that the bees have simply died off during the winter and that is why you are not seeing them. Given the critical role that pollinators have come to play in maintaining the biosphere which supports all life on Earth, and the fact that pollinators across the board are in serious decline world-wide, your concern is certainly understandable and warranted.
One note: We would not usually refer to the bees as "waking up" in spring since they don't actually sleep through the winter, but cluster and become dormant or inactive for a brief period during the winter season when the queen stops laying eggs. This is different from hibernation in which the organism's metabolism drops significantly and they go into what is described as a deep sleep. Healthy bees maintain their metabolism throughout the year and keep the temperature within the hive's cluster well above freezing during the entire winter.
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