If it's bumble bees, and the difference between them and honey bees is immediately obvious even to a casual observer, the bee keeper will have no interest in them from a commercial point of view.
yup, pretty sure they're bumble bees not honey bees. According to the most excellent britishbee.org.uk, I should leave them till late autumn and then dig up the little bee corpses
Don't cry, Mike! Apart from queens, bumble bees always die in the winter.
Honey bees don't or
shouldn't. The queen and quite a lot of workers live throughout the darker months, coming out to forage when it's warm enough, and therefore needing a honey store to keep them going until the queen starts laying again in the spring.
Mine did die out. The reason Varroa is such a git is that it attacks the bee larvae in their sealed cells. This has the effect of shortening the life of the worker bee from its normal 6 weeks to something less. Thus my colonies, which had looked perfectly healthy in September and October, failed to make it. An inspection of the debris on the hive floor quickly revealed the presence of the mites, which are about the size of a pin-head. They were dead.
Apparently the activity which really knocks it out of workers is feeding young with bee milk. The last lot to emerge in the late summer don't have any brood to bring up so have a much greater life expectancy and can survive the winter.