The winter cluster

The art of economy (Janine Kevits)

Winter represents a formidable challenge for fauna, as it must cope both with cold temperatures and with food scarcity. Some insects have “chosen” to avoid it by migrating to warmer regions; this is the case, for example, of the painted lady butterfly. Others concentrate their chances of survival on a few individuals—reproductives that are abundantly nourished during the favorable season and whose task is to found a new colony on their own the following spring; this is the strategy of wasps, hornets, and other solitary bees. The honey bee, by contrast, has found a different path: it is the powerful organization of the colonies it forms that enables it to meet this challenge, by implementing two means that are entirely original in the insect world—on the one hand, the storage of reserves, and on the other, the reorganization of the colony to form the winter cluster, a system characterized by the absence of brood and by modes of functioning that differ fundamentally from those of the summer colony.