Thousands of bees seen swarming over Indonesia airplane's wing

The phenomenon was caught on film and uploaded to Instagram last Friday afternoon, showing what looks like thousands of bees swarming over a Citilink Indonesia airplane's right wing.

There are numerous reasons why a chartered flight might be delayed. 

But recent passengers on a Citilink Indonesia flight were stung by a rather unusual occurrence, earlier this week - after one of the plane's wings was covered in bees.





The commuter flight, which was loaded with passengers, was about to depart from Indonesia's Kualanamu International Airport, which serves the North Sumatra province, when thousands of the insects descended.





Images taken from inside the craft show more than half if the wing completely covered by the swarm, while other bees hover nearby. 








Frustrated holiday-makers were left waiting more than 90 minutes for intervention from the local fire service, who dislodged the insects with jets of water.

Citilink corporate vice president, Benny Butarbutar, said: 'At 12:30pm the bees were removed by spraying the wing with water from the airport fire extinguisher unit so that the wings would be clean again.'

He added that the aircraft was carefully checked over by maintenance workers before being allowed to make its journey.



Not that this is an aviation first, of course.

In August 2012 a Delta flight from Pittsburgh to New York was delayed after tens of thousands of honeybees descended on the plane's wing.

After a delay of more than an hour, a local beekeeper was called in to collect the insects - which are deemed a protected species in the US.

'They were getting ready to fuel and they came around the corner of the plane and right there on the wing is a cluster of honeybees,' Master beekeeper Stephen Repasky of Meadow Sweet Apiaries told CBS Pittsburgh.



The vice president theorized that what logging practices that have disrupted the bees natural habitat may have forced them to look for a new home.