Tom Champagne, age 9, of West Warwick, Rhode Island, for has question:

Where do bees live in the winter?

The winter weather is too cold for the honeybees to go outdoors. Besides, there are no flowers around to give them golden pollen and sweet syrupy nectar. So in the fall, they get ready for the wintry weather ahead. They gather wax from certain leaves and use it to seal up the drafy cracks in the hive. The queen mother stops laying eggs and no more bee babies are born. Many of the old worker bees die at this time of year.

When winter arrives, the queen and a few hundred worker bees are inside the hive. They have honey stored in waxy white cells and they ration it out so that each bee gets her share of food. When the weather gets very cold, all the bees huddle together to keep each other warm. Then they look like a brown furry ball. The bees on the outside get cold, so they keep changing places with the warmer bees in the middle of the ball. Most of them do not go outdoors until the springtime sunbeams warm up the air.