Many thanks to Friends of Ham Lands for writing this article.

You will hear the birds sing, but what happens to butterflies and bees in the winter?

Butterflies and bees go through four main stages in their lifecycle: egg; caterpillar or larva; chrysalis or pupa; adult butterfly or bee.

Different butterfly species overwinter (hibernate) in each of these stages.

Twenty-three different species of butterfly have been spotted over Ham Lands in the spring, summer and autumn months.

Brimstone, small tortoiseshell, peacock and comma find a safe sheltered spot, sometimes in the hollows of trees, to hibernate as a butterfly.

Remarkably, the red admiral flies to southern Europe and the painted lady flies much further to the desert edges of north, west and sub Saharan Africa.

Five of the 23 species overwinter as a chrysalis, 10 as hibernating caterpillars. The speckled wood can overwinter as a chrysalis or a caterpillar, only the hairstreak over winters as an egg.

There are more than 250 species of bee in the UK, 90% of which are solitary.

Only one wild bee, the buff tailed bumble bee, could be spotted throughout the year and only in urban areas with their warmer microclimates and a much richer variety of overwinter flowering plants.

Apart from the buff tail, only new fertilised queen bumble bees survive to overwinter. The rest of the colony dies.

Read next: The wonder of nature on Ham Lands - fungi, worms and 46 types of tree

The new queens drink lots of nectar to build up their fat body and fill their honey stomach. This will allows them to survive the winter hibernation, then they find a suitable place to hibernate.

They hibernate individually, but a good hibernation site can be dug into by many bumblebees. In the UK this is often under a tree root or at the base of a wall, never in a place that could be warmed up early in the year by the winter sun.

Depending on the species and the spring temperature, they can hibernate for 6-9 months.

During hibernation if the temperature falls below a certain point glycerol is automatically produced in the queen's body. This is a form of anti-freeze that prevents ice crystals forming which would cause the fluids inside her cells to expand and her body to burst.

The queen honey bee can live for a few years, unlike the bumble bee that lives only for one season.

Honey bees overwinter as a colony. In the autumn the female worker bees are busy collecting nectar and pollen to build up their overwintering supplies.

Any male bees, drones, that remain after mating, are removed from the colony in order to conserve supplies.

They do not hibernate. Instead the bees overwinter clustered together, using their bodies to generate heat with bees taking turns to be on the cold outside.

On mild spring days the worker bees will venture outside to replenish their precious stocks of nectar and pollen.

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