Honey bees spend the winter in a hive. Bumble bees have a different life cycle where the queen will spend the winter alone in small burrowed nest in the ground.
In the spring she will emerge to find a larger nest to lay eggs and rear young. Over the summer a small colony emerges. Come winter, the young queens go off and nest leaving the rest of the colony, including the old queen, to die off. Thus the cycle starts again.
