By co-incidence, I have just been given a copy of Bee World from 1965 in
which a story is reported about bees and aircraft.

Seems that the beekeeper ran a market garden and a fifty hive apiary some
five miles south-west of an airbase.  He noticed that when the wind was from
the west or south-west and planes from the base flew low over his apiary,
the bees 'always came out to see what the noise was all about'.  On such a
day he set up some balloons on canes in an attempt to keep pigeons from his
crops and when about thirty were in place a plane flew over.  Within five
minutes his bees had stung the balloons and burst them all. The main point
of the story was that the balloons were red, yellow and blue - and the bees
burst them in that order!  The balloons were from five to a hundred yards
from the hives and the colours were randomly distributed.  The beekeeper was
not attacked.

I doubt this will help in the case of the helicopters, but I thought it an
interesting story.

Peter Edwards  (wondering if Jim can resist the challenge of trying to
replicate this one!)
[log in to unmask]
www.stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk/

(The story was NOT dated 1 April)

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