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: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 16 2016, @08:21PM
Brings to mind an old Pogo comic strip, in which the characters were going to do the A bomb one better by inventing a B bomb, which turned out to be a hornet's nest captured in a box.