For the second day in a row now, I’ve pulled up in the driveway and looked over to see bees doing an orienting flight in front of the hive.
When I first started reading about beekeeping, I saw mention of an orienting flight in some of the books. Basic definition is that when a bee first leaves the hive, i.e., goes from being a nurse bee to a field bee, she will fly in front of the hive a few times in order to figure out where the hive is located, what it looks like, etc. before she ventures off. There are a number of supplemental issues that are covered when books discuss orienting flights, e.g., how you can move a hive a short distance, but place grass in front of it so that the bees know to re-orient, why a row of hives will find that more bees “return” to the outer-most hives instead of the inner hives, etc.
The orientation is often described as a set of figure eights, but to my eyes, it looks like the bee is Catholic and is “crossing” the hive repeatedly – up down, left right, repeat in larger and large movements until the bee drifts off to find nectar.
One thing that I don’t think was ever covered in the books is that, at least in our hive, all of the bees looking to go out for the first time seem to do it at the same time – almost like there’s a new batch of bees ready to go out. You pull up in the driveway and the whole hive looks like it’s going nuts. When I first saw it, I thought that the hive might be under attack by wasps or that something was wrong, but when I walked up, the hive was calm, there were just a hundred or so bees in the air getting ready for their first excursion.
Hopefully we can get pictures at some point.