Honey bees are amazing collaborators, the very origin of the term “hive mind.” Every day is like an expertly-tuned eighty-thousand-piece orchestra.
Except in the airspace in front of the hive—there it’s a shit show.
I’ve been a mediocre backyard beekeeper for a few years now. I’m not very good at it yet. But I try. At the moment, I’ve got one hive sharing the garden with us that is on its fourth year. My longest run yet!
This damn heat dome hovering over us has everything on the Ridge seeking relief. By the afternoon each day, there is a dark cloud of bees swirling in front of the hive, trying to stay cool.
That cloud of foragers 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. 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 helicopter 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. In a good year, a strong hive can produce a hundred 16-oz 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!
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 are for occasional jaunts to relieve herself. Not the most extensive flight training.
Around the third or fourth week, worker bees are “promoted” to foraging. They sally forth into the world each day in search of pollen, nectar and water.
So, that cloud of bees in front of the hive that used to scare me 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, fully loaded with cargo.
When I observe the flight operations in front of a beehive with a former pilot’s eye, I see every rookie mistake I ever made. But the most common mistakes on display are these:
Mistake #1 - Hot-and-Heavy Landings
I don’t care what aircraft you fly; load it up to max gross weight, and you’re in for a tense landing. When you are heavy, you work hard so that you don’t “get behind the aircraft”—even in 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—so all power goes to lift.
But as powerful as a Chinook is, you can still 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 built a lot like a Chinook: its wings generate both lift and thrust. And it can haul more than 35 percent of its body weight in pollen or nectar—about the same load ratio as a fully fueled, crewed, and laden Chinook. A bit of symmetry in the universe I find pretty cool.
The point is, the Chinook pilot and the honeybee are in similar situations when they land heavy. It is an unforgiving phase of flight, and the biggest protection from mishap is experience.
And they’re only about three weeks old!
Mistake #2 - Feeling for the Ground
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 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 and need a little help not pranging the aircraft, 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’s counterintuitive. And 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 back up. So, the pilot takes out the power. And the ground rushes up. So, the pilot increases power… 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, then they surge back 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 honeybee 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.
Mistake #3 - Failure to Clear Flight Path Before Take Off
A worker 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 and 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’s nuts.
“Um… You’re in my landing spot!”
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 like to think about.
Fortunately, 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’s made of a substance called chitin—similar to the tough stuff in your fingernails. It’s hard, but flexible and can support a lot of weight and absorb impacts. Their wings are chitin as well.
So, when the foragers collide, it doesn’t do much damage.
It’s funny, though.
They tumble, spin out, and cartwheel 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.
Kinda inspiring.