Elizabeth May, age 7, of Rochester, N. Y., for her question:

Where do bees go when winter sets in?

When the flowers give way to frost and snow, the bees return to the hive, But they do not hibernate. Life is stripped down to bare essentials and of the thousands of bees that lived in the hive throughout the summer, only a  few hundred will survive until spring.

The  most important member of the hive is, of course, the queen mother who will survive many, many winters. Come fall, the lazy, pampered drones are turned outside to perish. Food is rationed and carefully doled out. Cracks and leaks in the hive are plugged and the bees spend much of their time clustered in a bell to keep warm. From time to time, the bees on the inside of the ball change places with those on the outside. No eggs are laved and no baby bees are born, so that when the older workers die during the winter their numbers are not replaced.