The door bell rang yesterday afternoon. It was my neighbor,
Carol. “Rich, I think there’s something wrong with your bees”, she said. “There’s
a big cloud of them flying all around
the hive, more than I ever saw before. It doesn’t look normal. Maybe something
bothered them? Maybe a raccoon?”
I went out to check on the hive, and sure enough, Carol was
right. I thought they might be getting ready to swarm. A swarm is when half of
the bees and the queen leave to establish a new hive. Bees do this when there
is no more room in the hive for more bees.
Or, maybe a summer swarm from another hive was trying take
over this one. Maybe, just maybe, I had a
huge aerial bee battle going on. Sort of like a bee version of ‘the Battle of
Britain’. I got on my knees to see if there were any dead or dying bees on the
ground in front of the hive. I checked the landing board to see if there were
any bees locked in mortal combat. Nope. Nada. What I had was a heck of a lot of
bees flying all around the front of the hive. I did next what any self
respecting junior bee keeper would do. I turned to Google.
I found out that what I was observing was the orientation
flight of three-week old bees. Workers do not fly right after leaving their wax
cells. They spend about three week doing jobs inside the hive. Then, like clock
work, they take their first foray into the world outside the hive. They fly
around in greater and greater circles, facing the hive to get their bearings.
They will remember this when they go out to forage for nectar and pollen. How
else would they know how to get home?
A
single orientation flight generally lasts less than 5 minutes, and successive
flights appear to increase in duration and distance from the colony.
Remarkably, the stem length of certain brain interneurons shorten during the
first flight, perhaps preparing the worker's nervous system to record and
remember orientation stimuli...
There
we go, orientation flights! Just another interesting fact from the world of the
honeybee. Here is link to a video I tried to include here. It wouldn't post. The video below the link is one that did post. Happy viewing.
I gotta clear out that stuff in the back corner of my backyard! :-)
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