With winters becoming warmer, however, buff-tailed bumblebees have been recorded in active colonies through the cold season, feeding on winter garden flowers such as Mahonia and Viburnum, and recently tree bumblebees and early bumblebees are following suit. Add some winter-flowering plants in your garden and watch out!

Adult wasps feed on sugary liquid secreted by their larvae, which themselves are fed on insects and carrion. In late summer, when the larvae have matured, wasps turn to feeding on nectar and other sweet substances. As these resources disappear with the onset of winter most of the wasps perish, leaving only the young queens to overwinter. These are the ones you might find in your curtains, where they tuck themselves up in tight bundles and shut down into dormancy.

Red admirals are also strongly migratory, and only recently have taken to hibernation - most still depart south in late autumn after feeding on fallen apples and ivy flowers. The other four hibernators seek out somewhere safe and insulated to sleep through the coldest months in a fairly constant temperature, relying on their ‘dead leaf’ camouflage to avoid predation. Garden sheds, attics and cellars offer suitable places, or beneath tree bark and in tree holes. Small tortoiseshells are the only species to regularly overwinter in houses.

The white butterflies (large, small, green-veined and orange tip), holly blues and green hairstreaks – all overwinter as a chrysalis (pupa), which survive in folds in tree bark, attached to twigs or on walls or fences. Camouflage is vital to avoid the attention of hungry birds and mice.

All the brown butterflies and fritillaries spend winter as caterpillars. They enter diapause – a period of suspended development - hidden away in clumps of dead leaves or grass tussocks as small caterpillars, re-emerging in spring to feed and grow. Common blues and small coppers adopt the same strategy. A large proportion of the species overwintering as caterpillars are meadow and grassland species, so you can really help them to survive by leaving some uncut grass to shelter them.

Purple hairstreaks, brown hairstreaks and silver studded blues are among the species which winter as eggs, each attached to a twig of the appropriate food plant so that when the egg hatches in spring there is a ready food supply for the very hungry caterpillar.

The order in which we see butterflies flying in the spring depends on how the species overwinters. Those who survived as dormant adults are the first in flight, but others will soon follow as the season warms and our countryside comes alive again.