For a variety of reasons, a number of bee hives have been installed on the property adjoining the airfield.
Bee keeping is a legitimate agricultural activity, with numerous benefits to the environment.
Most of the time, bees go about their business without concern to humans. The females work bringing in honey and pollen, tending the nursery, cleaning, guarding, attending the queen.
The workers, female, live for only a few weeks, working incessantly. The drones, males, don’t do much. Their object is to mate with a virgin queen and then die.
So what has this got to do with flying, or Sydney Recreational Flying Club?
Under certain conditions, a hive will swarm. Swarms are quite harmless, the bees are engorged with honey and away from their hives. They are not aggressive.
Swarms occur mainly because the hive is crowded. The workers will establish queen cells, the queen will lay a female egg. The workers feed the incipient queen royal jelly for a longer period than for normal workers, and a new queen starts to form.
The two larger cells in the photo above, pointing down, are queen cells. The one on the left has hatched. The right hand one is uncapped, possibly there is no egg in it. The other capped cells are normal brood, the protruding ones beneath the queen cells are drone cells.
A hive can’t have two queens, one will kill the other.
When these queen cells appear, the hive is about to swarm. The old queen will prepare to fly off with about half the workers. Swarming is a kind of macro-level reproduction for a hive.
OK what has this got to do with flying or SRFC?
Swarms have phases.The first phase to be concerned about is when the bees fly in a large group, often in an excited pattern, or sometimes a seemingly co-ordinated group. This phase doesn’t last long, but is disconcerting. There could be many thousands of bees, in a group ten or more metres diameter. If you see this, I’d recommend not flying through them. Some bees are likely to get in through a ventilation port into the cabin of your plane.
This phase lasts a short time, half an hour or so.
After this phase, the swarm will clump together in a ball, somewhat about the size of a football or soccer ball. They will settle in a tree, under eaves, anything convenient, still searching for a final destination. This phase can last several days.
They are quite docile. A bee keeper could shake them into a cardboard box and take off with his booty to start a new hive.
However, the bees at this point are looking for a new home. Something with a narrow entrance and in the sun will do nicely.
They won’t go for a plane in a hangar, too dark and doubly enclosed. A plane outside, with a narrow ventilation hole might do very nicely indeed. The side of a caravan, nice and warm with a ventilation port also would be tickety-boo. A house with a cavity between a brick wall and the internal gyprock are also favorites.
Back at the hive, the new queen takes a while to hatch. When she does, she makes a ‘piping’ sound. If there is another queen around, only one will prevail.
The new virgin queen must leave the hive to mate. She collects enough sperm from the ‘lucky’ drones to lay incessantly for a number of years, never leaving the hive again, except, possibly, in a swarm.
I often image the drones’s eyes as having large aviator sunglasses, and the drones as hanging around like a bunch of trash-talking freeloaders. Once in their lifetime, if they make the effort, they get lucky, and then it’s all over.
Yep, that’d be right. Aviators to the core.
