Photo By Seaman Apprentice Eliora Sims | 240517-N-CO542-1434 Lt. j.g. Kaylee Newcomb, the cyber officer aboard amphibious...... read more read more
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PACIFIC OCEAN – During a short period at sea aboard amphibious assault carrier USS Tripoli (LHA 7) Lt. j. g Kaylee Newcomb fell in alongside her fellow Sailors for a foreign object debris (FOD) walkdown, their eyes focused on finding any debris that could cause damage to aircraft. It was late in the day and it was one of the last tasks left to be accomplished. As the group walked the windy flight deck, Newcomb’s eye caught a spot of yellow against the flat grey of the ship. But it was no piece of debris. It was a lone honey bee, somehow separated from its hive and far away from its natural habitat. Struck with curiosity, Newcomb put the bee in her sleeve to keep it warm, resolving to find a temporary enclosure with sugar water to keep it alive. Not overly alarmed, Newcomb resumed the FOD walkdown with her new passenger. Then she found the second bee. One bee this far out at sea was strange enough. Two was an unbelievable coincidence.
The thought bugged her throughout the night until the next morning. She heard rumors of even more bees near the aircraft crane, called the ‘Tilly’ by the crew, and she decided to investigate. After carefully examining the underside of the Tilly, Newcomb’s suspicions were confirmed. The inside of the massive crane was crawling with bees. Tripoli was now host to thousands of unexpected ship riders, and Newcomb took it upon herself to find them a new home. As a beekeeper with her own hive, Newcomb was the only Sailor on board with any sort to experience to safely get the bees to a new home port.
As the cyber officer, keeping unwanted bugs out of Tripoli’s critical information systems was nothing new to Newcomb. “I am tasked with the security of our computer networks aboard Tripoli,” Newcomb said. “I ensure they are functional and not being compromised.”
Keeping bugs out may have been a matter of routine, but getting this massive swarm into a new home was another matter entirely. Newcomb had an interesting theory for how the bees may have found their way inside the Tilly. Newcomb suggested that because it was May, the middle of swarming season, the bees had made the unfortunate decision of using the Tilly for shelter, right before the ship got underway for a three-day period.
“Over time, an established hive will become too big, it’ll just keep growing and growing and growing. During swarming season, they get so big that they need to split,” Newcomb explained. “They’ll create a second queen, and half will fly away, while half will stay with the first queen. It appears that these bees were looking for a new home. They weren’t nesting, they were temporarily staying there. They were in a hotel while looking for a permanent place to live.”
Newcomb had only recently taken up beekeeping in April of 2024, but she had prepared herself by reading books, researching videos and taking local courses before acquiring her own hive at home. Even with her relatively limited experience, she knew that removing these wild bees would pose a complicated challenge.
“Normally swarms are pretty gentle, but these girls were hungry, cold, scared, and annoyed that they couldn’t find a permanent home,” Newcomb said. “They were not in the mood to be put in a box. They just wanted to huddle back together.”
After pulling back into port, the bees remained inside the Tilly. Newcomb gave them time to move on naturally, but they remained embarked. She went home to fetch her beekeeper suit, smoker, and bee vacuum, or ‘bee-vac’, and with some help from her partner Zach, she donned her beekeeper ensemble and set about helping Tripoli’s small yellow stowaways finish their permanent change of station. As she combed through the colony in her hot pink beekeeping outfit, Newcomb did not find any honeycombs within the Tilly, as the bees had been too preoccupied with keeping each other warm to build any structures inside the crane.
“When swarming, they’ll be in a big clump trying to be safe and maintain heat,” Newcomb said.
Using this to her advantage, Newcomb exposed the bees to smoke to make them even more docile. According to Newcomb, the leading theory as to why smoke calms bees is that it puts them in a sort of communications blackout.
“Bees communicate either by dancing or by releasing pheromones,” Newcomb said. “They have panic pheromones that tells them something is going on and it’s time to freak out, so when I smoke a hive, it prevents that pheromone from spreading.”
Once smoked, Newcomb was able to reach far into the underside of the “Tilly” and scoop out as many bees as she could with her hand. She then used a special bee vacuum to remove the rest and secure them into a wire mesh cage. She then took the bees home and sprayed them with some sugar water that night so they had something to snack on, and relocated them into a brand-new hive the next morning, allowing them a chance to rest and recover from their involuntary voyage.
Newcomb was happy that her swarm-removal skills were up to the task despite little prior experience.
“I just got into bees, I’m definitely not a bee expert,” Newcomb said. “I was very grateful I was given the opportunity to remove the bees. People get a little intimidated by bees, but honeybees generally are gentle, they’re not out to sting you. I’m glad that the command was supportive of me removing the bees and giving them a new home. It was fun.”
Newcomb named the new hive the “Seabees,” after the United States Naval Construction Battalion, who specialize in providing rapid construction support to Navy and Marine Corps operations worldwide. The Seabee logo is a large, menacing bee, armed with construction tools and a machine gun. Despite the tough legacy of the Seabees and the fighting spirit of the Tripoli’s storied predecessors, Newcomb’s gentler approach gave the fledgling colony the opportunity they needed to begin constructing a new home for themselves, one new comb at a time.
| Date Taken: | 05.29.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 05.30.2024 01:13 |
| Story ID: | 472515 |
| Location: | SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 277 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Tripoli’s Un-bee-lievable Find, by PO2 Malcolm Kelley, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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