MARCH is a month punctuated by moments that make me smile. They are usually instances that remind me of winter’s impending and inevitable retreat – the first blackbird’s song from the back garden, a lone yellow star of celendine on a south-facing bank and, of course, that lovely day on the 25th of the month when the clocks “spring” forward.

If there is one March moment that gives me more pleasure than all the others it is the sight (and sound) of my first bumble bee of the year.

Now, I know that these furry insects regularly appear in February down in southern counties and no doubt some readers will have been lucky enough to have heard a buzzing Bombus on a warm afternoon before the Beast from the East hit us, but not me. I have yet to encounter one in 2018 and I am looking forward to the experience.

One of the best things about March bumble bees is that they are invariably big individuals. This is because all these early emergers are queens that have been asleep for the past four months or so.

Unlike honey bees, which store honey to sustain the whole colony throughout the winter, all bumble bee workers and males die along with their old queen at the end of autumn.

Only a handful of fertilised new queens from each colony survive the cold months by hibernating, usually in old, abandoned mouse holes.

Deep below ground the bees cannot detect the increasing day-length of approaching spring so it’s thought that gradually rising temperatures are the trigger for their wake-up.

The actual day of emergence is a happy one for us human observers but for each queen herself it is fraught with danger. She has not eaten for months and her energy levels will be very low.

Her first priority is to fuel up on sugary nectar and to do this she first needs to fly and second, find flowers – neither of which is as simple as it sounds.

A bee’s flight muscles have to be at 30°C for the animal to take-off and the best way for the queen to warm up is to sunbathe.

If she picks a dull day to emerge, or the sun goes in, she will have to “shiver” her muscles up to temperature, wasting valuable energy in the process. Once airborne she will then search out nectar-bearing flowers which, as we know, are few and far between at this time of year.

Out in the countryside, life-saving blooms for early-flying bees are primroses, lesser celendines and wood anemones, but closer to home it’s garden exotics like crocuses, hellebores and grape hyacinths that do the same job.

With the queen’s sugar tanks filled, she then switches to eating protein-rich pollen for her hundreds of developing eggs and goes in search of a nest site. This is usually underground again, although some species of bee seem to prefer holes in trees or even old birds nests.

Every warm, sunny day for the next month she will forage and feed, storing up wax pots of honey and piles of pollen for her to eat on rainy days.

During this time she also lays some of her eggs and the daughters that hatch four or five days later she lovingly tends and feeds herself until they are old enough to fly about a month later.

These are the first tiny worker bees that we should start to see in early May.

After all her hard work the queen will then be able to relax; all the colony’s chores can be done by her daughters while she puts her metaphorical feet up and just lays eggs for the rest of her life.

I mentioned earlier that all March bumble bees are big, but sharp-eyed observers may notice that even among these early fliers there are two size varieties.

Queens of the aptly-named early bumble bee (Bombus pratorum) are about ¾ of an inch long with an orange tail whereas the buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) queen can be well over an inch long and with (yes, you guessed it) a buff-coloured tail.

Ryedale’s five other species of bumble bee will still be tucked up in bed until April when the weather is warmer and there are flowers aplenty but, if our brave early birds survive frost and starvation, they will have a real head start in the colony building job.