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Bee Flight
As many of you seem to know (for god knows people like to inform me frequently enough), an aerodynamics engineer sometime in the 30s famously noted that according to known laws of physics, bumblebees can't fly.
I came across an interesting article the other day about honeybee flight, and it addresses this interesting question:
"The problem was that the engineer was using fixed-wing calculations and not the flexible, hovering type of wing that bees have. However, there is still a serious physiological problem and that is the wings of bees move (flap) at 200-400 times a second, and this is at least 10 times the speed that muscles or nerves can operate"
So there you have it. They still can't fly.
Additional interesting facts: (1) there are no muscles in a bees wings; (2) bees have four wings. In fact one of the distinguishing differences between bees and insects that are not bees (such as flies which will sometimes try to look just like bees) is that bees have four wings. Each side has a hind and fore wing. These wings are normally hooked together but they can also unhook them (presumably for some useful purpose), and several diseases and parasites can cause their wings to become unhookable (so called K-wing syndrome). The oriental hornet I met in Turkey was suffering from this condition, making her two right-side wings clearly distinguishable:
The thorax (middle section) of a honeybee is almost entirely muscles. These muscles can be used to tilt and maneuver the wings to control flight (the wings move in a swimming motion during flight), flexed to cause the wings to flap, or de-coupled from the wings and flexed simply to create heat.
This heat creation ability is interesting because while bees as insects are technically "cold blooded," they can actually raise and maintain their own body temperature. They must be around 95f in order to fly and must keep their brood about that warm for it to stay alive, but they themselves can survive as low as around 56f and will allow themselves to drop down that low if they don't have one of the above reasons to maintain a high temperature. See also, some bees are employed as living mobile space heaters.
As to how the wings move ten times faster than muscles and nerves can fire, the muscles put the wings into vibration "like a violin string." At 200-300 vibrations per second, it is, as you will notice, in the audible range. By so doing bees can move 50 millagrams of honey or nectar at a time, which is about half their body weight.
Quotes from "To Be Or Not to Be A Bee" (Part III), by Roger Hoopingarner, Bee Culture magazine September 2011
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Also BEEEEEEEEES.
My bees are about to go into hibernation mode. TOO COLD FOR BEES.
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I admit you've taught me a lot about bees since we've been friends, but you will never convince me that wasps and hornets are anything other than evil bastards. LOL. No offence.
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Did someone say... *BEES*??
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/bees
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I think some people use this as kind of a smug anti-science thing, like the bees can fly because God is above science, but I just think it's a cool thing that we get to come up with all kinds of different theories until we hit on one that explains what's happening. And I also think that God is science, so by figuring out explanations, we're figuring out how God makes things work. Awesome.
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It made me kind of sad, because he seems to believe that our science is invalid unless it allows God to do what he does, but I figure God created all the laws of physics and therefore he gets to break them if he damn well feels like it. That doesn't mean the laws are invalid -- it just means that he's outside them.
(N.B.: I am neither Christian nor monotheist, but colloquially I prefer to talk about a singular male God because of my cultural upbringing and also because that's what the people one usually argues with about this sort of thing believe in. It's more worth my time to open their minds to the ineffability and transcendence of God than it is to beef about which God is actually in charge.)
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Meaning a theoretical limit for the nervous system is 1000+ impulses/second for each individual neuron. With that, a sustainable firing rate of 200-400 impulses/second sounds, to me, fairly reasonable.
Since the flapping of wings appears to be a large number of repeated movements, with very minor alterations to change direction and speed, it would seem that very efficient neural controls would be possible - a single "start flapping" instruction followed by a "stop flapping" when it's time to land.
Similar to how you generally don't consciously think about walking, you just *do it* unless you've got a special reason to be concentrating.
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