El Reg reports
20,000 [...] bees were found in the exhaust nozzle of an F-22 Raptor engine following flight operations at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, on June 11, 2016.
Rather than kill the bees--America is badly affected by hive collapse, the base decided to call on a beekeeper to take them away.
Andy Westrich, US Navy retiree, was the apiarist known to the on-base entomologist (the Air Force keeps insect experts on its bases, apparently). Westrich used vacuum hoses to trap the bees, and he calculated the swarm size from the weight of the captured bees--eight pounds, or in modern numbers, 3.6 kilos.
From the USAF release: "Westrich suspected that the swarm of bees were on their way to a new location to build a hive for their queen. [...] Westrich believes she landed on the F-22 to rest. Honey bees do not leave the queen, so they swarmed around the F-22 and eventually landed there."
wordlessTech has a good photo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:43PM
so does the bee-hive have a radar cross-section of one-bee thanks to the stealth capabilities of the raptor, to which they attached (which leads to the question of how the dang the other bees found that stealtified queen) or does the raptor now have the radar cross-section of ... oh ..errr ... 20'000 bees?