By November, Marbleheaders have begun their annual negotiations with winter.
Garden furniture is put away, the first real heating bill is on its way and someone is trying to remember where they put the snow shovel last April.
Meanwhile, in the woods, ponds and backyards around us, preparations of a different sort are underway.
Some of our most familiar wild neighbors have survival strategies that make our storm windows and woodpiles look modest. Others perform feats that scientists are still trying to understand. Much of this unfolds just beyond the kitchen window while we go about our day.
A living furnace
When temperatures drop, honeybees gather into a tightly packed cluster around their queen. Thousands of workers press together, creating what amounts to a living furnace.
The bees generate heat by contracting their flight muscles without moving their wings.
Those on the outside form an insulating layer, while the bees inside produce much of the warmth. As temperatures change, the cluster loosens or tightens. Over the course of the winter, the whole mass slowly creeps across the comb toward its stored honey, the fuel that keeps the colony warm.
Through the coldest months, the colony’s chief concern is keeping itself alive. But as winter loosens its grip, the queen begins laying eggs again, and the bees face a new challenge. They must keep their developing young at about 95 degrees, even when it is below freezing outside. Warming the brood burns through honey much faster, just as the colony’s stores are running low.
Late winter is the colony’s leanest stretch, and beekeepers keep a close eye on their hives in March. But the bees keep their young warm through it all, and when the first maples and crocuses bloom, the pantry begins to fill again.
Thousands of bees, one shared heating system, and not a thermostat in sight.
The chickadee’s remarkable memory
The cheerful black-capped chickadee, a regular at backyard feeders, spends the fall stocking up.
Chickadees hide seeds and other food in crevices in tree bark, among evergreen needles and in countless other locations. Rather than creating one large storehouse, they spread their supplies among thousands of hiding places, and they can remember where many of them are, sometimes weeks later.
In a 2024 study, scientists discovered something surprising about the chickadee’s memory. Each time the bird hid a seed, a particular group of brain cells produced a distinctive pattern of activity, much like the barcode that identifies a product in a grocery store. When the chickadee later retrieved the seed, the same pattern briefly reappeared. Researchers suspect these neural barcodes help the birds tell one hiding experience from another, even when the hiding places are only inches apart.
Imagine remembering thousands of places where you put something last October. Most of us would be pleased to locate our reading glasses.
A winter without breathing
Beneath the ice of New England ponds, painted turtles are pulling off a trick of their own.
These turtles breathe air all summer, but in winter they can remain submerged for months without coming to the surface.
As the water cools, their metabolism slows dramatically, reducing their need for oxygen.
They can absorb some dissolved oxygen directly from the water through specialized body surfaces.
Stranger still, painted turtles can survive long stretches with virtually no oxygen at all.
Their bodies switch to a backup power system, and their shells help neutralize the acids that build up as a result.
Above the ice, the pond looks deserted. Below it, a turtle is quietly holding its breath for the entire winter. Medical researchers have been studying this ability, hoping it might one day help protect human hearts and brains when oxygen runs short.
Frozen solid, back by spring
The wood frog takes an entirely different approach.
As autumn turns to winter, this small woodland resident settles beneath fallen leaves and lets the cold take over. Its heart stops beating. It stops breathing. For all practical purposes, it appears dead.
But the frog has an unusual defense. As freezing begins, its liver releases large amounts of glucose into its bloodstream. The sugar helps protect its cells from damage while ice forms in the spaces between them.
When temperatures rise, the frog thaws, its heart begins beating again, and it resumes its life, none the worse for having spent part of the winter as a frogsicle.
In the spring, the males gather at woodland pools and begin calling for mates. If you have ever heard what sounded like a flock of ducks quacking in the woods on a cool evening in early April, you have probably heard wood frogs.
A different kind of winter
We tend to think of winter as a season when nature goes quiet. Maples and oaks stand bare, ponds freeze, and the woods grow quieter.
Yet inside a hive, thousands of bees are keeping one another warm. Under the leaves, a frog may be frozen with its heart stopped. Chickadees are retrieving meals they tucked into the bark weeks ago, while turtles rest beneath the ice.
The animals have worked out their winter arrangements, some of them astonishingly sophisticated, without the help of weather forecasts, snowblowers or a trip to the hardware store.
Margaret Bacon is the founder and senior editor of VeryCoolFacts.com, home of a free weekly newsletter, and Safe Harbor Media Group, an educational media platform built around verified, insight-driven storytelling. Her work explores history, science, culture and the enduring patterns of human behavior that shape how we think and act today. She has lived in Marblehead for 40 years.
