Winter
Honey Bees don't hibernate but when it gets cold they cluster together to keep warm. The cluster is a tightly packed group of bees huddled together in the middle of the hive. The bees will eat their stored honey through the winter and they use this carbohydrate food to give them the energy to keep warm. On warm sunny days they can sometimes be seen flying in the middle of the day.
Spring
As the weather warms in Spring the Queen will start to lay eggs and as the first spring flowers open the bees will go out on warm days to collect pollen to feed the emerging bees. Snowdrops and crocuses are some of the early flowers visited by bees. As the days lengthen and more flowers appear the hives start to be busy with newly hatched bees joining the older winter bees. By April the older winter bees will have died off and the younger newly hatched bees will have taken over the running of the hive and the queen will be in full swing laying up to 1000 eggs per day.
Summer
Early summer the colony will have built up and they may be thinking of Swarming. In the natural world, swarming is the only way that honey bees have of increasing colony numbers. In the wild only 20% of swarms will survive their first winter. Beekeepers are able to help the bees by either making increase to the number of colonies they have or by helping the bees control their swarming instinct.
By mid summer the colony will be full size and busy collecting nectar to make honey. The bees know that they will need honey stores to see them through the cold winter months. Fortunately for beekeepers the bees collect much more honey that they actually need so we are able to remove the excess. Late July/early August is the usual time for removing the honey harvest should we be lucky enough that our bees have had the good weather and fortune to be able to visit lots of flowers during the summer months.
Autumn
This is the time when honey bees prepare for the long winter months ahead. They need to survive the cold and damp and also do not have the opportunity to visit flowers to top up their stores of food. They start by reducing the number of mouths to feed. They throw out the male bees, Drones. The drones only purpose in life is to mate with a virgin or new queen and since there will be no new queens over winter they are not needed. The older summer worker bees (female) also die off leaving a much smaller group of healthy winter bees that will see the colony through to next Spring.