Busy Bees

When a bees are relatively young and also when you move their hive to a new location during the night, they will need to take what is often called "orientation flights."  The first part of this consists of hovering in front of the hive entrance, looking at it for a while, and then landing at the entrance again.  Then the bee transitions to a more adventurous phase of looking at the front of the hive from a variety of angles before once again landing at the entrance.  This process continues with the bee going further and further from the hive until she is has a very clear impression of what the front of the hive looks like and where it is in relation of various other local landmarks.

Once a bee has become oriented, the nature of her flight changes dramatically.  Now, instead of loitering around the entrance of the hive, she streaks out of the entrance at full throttle.  Within about the first 10 to 20 feet of the entrance she'll simultaneously rise to an altitude of between 15 and 30 feet above the ground and turn herself till she is facing her distant target (i.e. some patch of flowers she had either just visited or learned about from another bee's dancing).  Finally, without cutting speed she'll then race towards the target. 

Interestingly, I've noticed that, when they are first leaving the hive, some of the bees will spiral upwards, while others will just veer upwards.  I don't know what causes this difference, but one possible explanation is the the spiralling bees are attempting to better orient themselves to the sun and the veering bee's already know where they need to go and don't bother with the spiralling. 

Anyway, because it is very hard to show to speed at which the bees leave their hive, I've attached a short video clip I made a few days ago of the bees entering and leaving their hive. Unfortunately, Blogger appears to have down-sampled the video quite a bit, so it's very hard to see anything.  If you look very carefully, though, you can see the bees streaking out of the entrances.