When I was a kid I would sometimes pedal the 10 miles on back roads to the neighboring town to visit a hobby shop. On one trip I rode into a large cloud of insects without ever stopping to ask myself what they might be. Clouds of insects that large are not common but it did not trigger any curiosity on my part. As you would guess in this thread it was a swarm of bees. I entered the swarm on a slight downgrade and once I realized what I was in the middle of I started pedaling like mad. I suffered no harm but I did manage to go fast enough to splatter a bee against my glasses! That could have been a painful encounter if I had not been wearing glasses....

I've since read that bees are quite docile when they are swarming so I probably would have been fine if I had just calmly continued on my way at my normal speed. Who among us would be brave enough to do that? And does that strategy still work if the bees are the newfangled Africanized "killer" bees??

Ken