I got a reminder this week just how much a bee sting hurts when they really get you. I don’t think I did anything to deserve it and said as much when it happened. Loudly. I must have looked hilarious, cursing and slapping myself in the face as I ran away.
She got me just above my left eyebrow and her stinger stayed in when I knocked her off. This is bad because a honeybee’s stinger continually pumps venom until it’s empty. I think I got the full 50 microgram dose.
The author hours after the merciless attack
I’ll often take a walk around the hill after lunch to stretch my legs and fight off the after-lunch-drowsies. Sometimes I’ll pause by the hives on a warm day when the girls are active. I like to stand near the hive entrance and watch them come and go. I’ve copied a blog from my old website below. It’s from a few years ago. Maybe my attacker took offense to the low regard I have expressed for their flying abilities. Oh well. I still love ‘em.
Original Entry - Summer 2022
Honey bees are amazing.
They work together as a coordinated collective, each hive member knowing exactly what to do, every day, in concert with the others to enable the hive’s survival.
Except in the air in front of the hive, that is…
There it is a shit show.
I’ve been keeping bees for a few years now. I’m not very good at it yet. But I try.
I am excited because one of our two hives made it through the winter this year. The weather is getting warmer and the girls are getting more active. Soon, their labors will start in earnest. I can’t wait.
I started two hives from Nucs late last April. When you do that, you are basically in a race against the winter. Can the queen and her girls get strong enough and build up enough honey and pollen stores to get through the winter?
One made it. One didn’t.
Making it through the winter is a big deal for a hive. It means they will probably be strong enough to take advantage of the spring nectar flows. This is an enormous advantage and means, if the hive can stay healthy, they will be swimming in honey by the time winter comes around again.
And that means Anna and I will get to harvest some honey without endangering the hive.
I can tell the girls are feeling strong and are itching to get going because on warm days the cloud of bees in front of the hive is getting dense. Not as dense as it is on a hot July day in the middle of the sourwood nectar flow, but thick enough to be interesting.
That cloud of girls flying around in front of the hive has always fascinated me.
When I first started keeping bees, it scared me a bit.
It looked threatening. Potentially aggressive. I pictured them taking offense at my presence, chasing me away, dozens of stingers piercing my skin.
As I got more comfortable being around the girls, though, and spent more time observing them up close, the cloud of bees became less threatening.
Then I sat down next to my first hive one afternoon and watched them for about half an hour.
Soon I was laughing.
I have to tell you this, as a former pilot…
Bees suck at flying.
I don’t mean they don’t get it done. Obviously they do. Just one 16 oz jar of honey, for example, represents well over 100,000 flight miles for the bees that made it. In a good year, a strong hive can produce a hundred 16 ounce jars of honey representing over 7 Million total flight miles.
So, yeah… they get plenty of flying done.
It just ain’t pretty.
It makes sense when you realize that most of the bees zipping around outside the hive are just a few weeks old.
A few weeks into flight school, I still couldn’t land a helicopter without killing myself and everyone else on board.
During the summer, the average worker bee only lives about six weeks. She spends the first two or three weeks doing shit details inside the hive. The only times she leaves and gets to fly is for occasional flights to relieve herself. Not the most extensive flight training.
Around the third or fourth week, worker bees are “promoted” to foraging. At which point they sally forth into the world every day in search of pollen, nectar and water.
So, that cloud of bees in front of the hive is made up of hundreds of bees who have only had a few training flights to figure out how their wings work. Half of the bees in the cloud are trying to take off on their foraging mission. The other half is trying to bring it in for a landing after loading themselves up with cargo.
When I observe the flight operations in front of a beehive, I see every rookie pilot mistake I ever made. But the most common mistakes on display by the girls are these three:
1. Landing with too much airspeed when heavy
2. “Feeling” for the ground while trying to land
3. Failure to clear their intended flight path.
First, a little context for non pilots…
I don’t care what aircraft you fly; you load it up to its max gross weight and you are in for a tense landing. When you are heavy, you work hard so that you don’t “get behind the aircraft,” even on a chinook.
Chinooks are powerful flying platforms, by the way, because all of their power goes to generating lift through their twin rotor discs. On a conventional helicopter, 15% to 20% of power is diverted to the tail rotor for directional control. But a chinook achieves directional control by tilting its rotor discs.
As powerful as a chinook is, you can get in a lot of trouble when flying her at max gross weight. The engines and transmissions are under a tremendous amount of stress and it is easy to overtax and damage them. The aircraft is sluggish and slow to respond to control inputs. This means you have to “stay ahead of the aircraft” - To plan and anticipate so that you avoid having to make sudden inputs that overtax the airframe or power train and that might not get you out of trouble.
A honey bee is configured similarly to a chinook in that its wings produce both lifting and directional thrust. Honey bees are some of the most powerful cargo hauling insects and can carry over 35% of their body weight in pollen or nectar. That is, believe it or not, about the same cargo to total weight ratio of a fueled, crewed, and laden chinook.
The point is, the chinook pilot and the honeybee are in similar situations when they are approaching a landing while heavily loaded. It is an unforgiving phase of flight, and the biggest protection from mishap is experience.
And, remember… they’re only about three weeks old.
Any landing, in fact, is an event where experience is valuable. This applies to the next common piloting error among helicopter pilots and honey bees - “Feeling” for the ground while landing.
Like all aircraft, honey bees and helicopters have to deal with ground effects when flying at very low altitudes. Ground effects occur when the air being thrust down from the aircraft’s lifting surfaces can’t get out of the way fast enough. It basically piles up under the aircraft and creates a cushion of air that buoys the aircraft.
Ground effect can be a great thing if you are in that max gross weight situation, but not so great if you are trying to land quickly and efficiently. It takes a little experience to learn how to anticipate ground effect and account for it. In a helicopter, when hovering or landing, it means that you have to take out more power the closer you get to the ground. It is the same for a honeybee.
The problem is that, early on, a novice pilot is not a good judge of rates of closure. What is too much? What is too little? Seeing the ground rushing up quickly is unnerving, and the natural reaction is to increase power to slow your descent. Usually, the novice does that right about the time ground effects kick in, so the aircraft lurches higher. Then the pilot takes out the power, then the ground rushes up, the pilot increases power, then… you get the picture.
It’s hilarious to watch, if you have the time. Sitting next to the hive or on one of the training airfields down at Fort Rucker, you can easily spot the pilots having trouble landing. They inch down, their six legs extending to meet the ground, and then they surge into the air, they hover around for a few seconds, confused. Then start sinking towards the ground again. Then they surge back up. And so on.
Watching a tired girl try to land herself takes me back to those old training airfields in Alabama during the summer of ’91, the flight instructor yelling at me, my buddy behind me in the jump seat laughing, my aircraft porpoising across the landing area.
The last common tendency of inexperienced honey bees is their failure to clear their flight path before taking off. A honey bee leaving the hive on a foraging mission walks out of the hive opening, takes a few purposeful footsteps and then launches herself into the air in what we called, back in the day, a max performance take off. Obstacles or other honey bees be damned.
Sometimes this method works out, and the departing forager sails off into the wide blue yonder on her mission without affecting her airborne sisters in the cloud of bees.
But, at least half the time, her departure cuts off an approaching bee, causing them to make last-minute adjustments to their flight path or, worse, causes a midair collision.
Hilarious to watch.
Maybe I shouldn’t laugh.
I mean, if you were to put me into the same small airspace with HUNDREDS of other aircraft trying to land a take off at the same time with NO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL at all, I would probably stroke out from terror.
In an aircraft, you don’t do shit without ATC permission. They assign headings and altitudes and keep all the flying machines from banging into each other. Beehives don’t have ATC. They have instinct and millions of years of evolution that have instilled within them a drive to survive.
But no air traffic control.
On a warm day when the pollen abounds, and the nectar is flowing, it is nuts.
Worker bees launch themselves as fast as they can into the air as their comrades careen towards the hive, loaded down with cargo and unable to control their descent. Others, less heavy with payload, hover in front of the hive, lurching up and down trying to land.
The result is an endless succession of midair collisions.
In the Army, the thought of a mid-air collision made my blood run cold. They killed people. I had my share of close calls that I still don’t want to think about.
There are two big differences in front of a beehive.
None of the girls are carrying highly flammable jet fuel on board, and they are all equipped with exoskeletons.
A honey bee, like all insects, has a hard outer shell called an exoskeleton. It is made of a substance called chitin, which is sort of like the stuff that makes up your fingernails. It’s hard, but flexible and can support a lot of weight and absorb impacts. Their wings consist of chitin as well.
So, when the girls collide, it doesn’t do much damage.
It’s funny, though.
They tumble, spin out, and cartwheel and through the air or across the landing surface in front of the hive.
Then they get up and try again.
And again.
Until finally, they are safely back on the ground.
They walk into the hive, drop their payload, turn around and do it again