collision detection: Mystery of bee flight finally solved

January 21, 2006

Mystery of bee flight finally solved

In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan analyzed bees and argued that, according to the known laws of flight, bees shouldn't be able to stay aloft. But now researchers at the California Institute of Technology have finally figured out the secret. They put some bees in a helium-rich tank, which has an atmosphere less dense than normal air, forcing them to work harder to stay aloft -- and giving the scientists a new way to watch their flight dynamics.

The first surprise? Bees flap their wings way faster than they ought to. Normally, the smaller the insect, the faster the flapping. But bees flap 230 times a second, nearly the same as the 200-per-second fruit fly, which is 80 times smaller than bees. The bigger surprise came when they compared the bees' performance in regular air to the thinner atmosphere, as the scientists told LiveScience:

The bees made up for the extra work by stretching out their wing stroke amplitude but did not adjust wingbeat frequency.
"They work like racing cars," Altshuler said. "Racing cars can reach higher revolutions per minute but enable the driver to go faster in higher gear. But like honeybees, they are inefficient."

My favorite part of the story is near the end, when the scientists can't help taking a potshot at the intelligent-design crowd. "People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly," says Douglas Altshuler. "We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us." Zing!

Posted by Clive Thompson at January 21, 2006 08:26 PM

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Comments

Heh. So that covers the bees… when do you think scientists will explain the birds part of the equation to the intelligent-design crowd?

Posted by: johntunger at January 21, 2006 11:30 PM

I don't believe this research. An 'intelligent' creator would have designed the bee to be more efficient. Or perhaps not. I suppose I can't question the designer's intentions.

Really though, cool stuff. There is an sudden influx of cool bee-related research.

Posted by: Steve E. at January 22, 2006 1:51 AM

That's cool, but the picture you've used to accompany the post is of a tiny winged chihuahua wearing a sweater.

Posted by: Mark Lerner at January 22, 2006 9:07 AM

Ahahhaa!

Yes, Steve, the bee research has been coming fast and furious lately.

Posted by: Clive at January 22, 2006 2:55 PM

ObPictureCredit: Me, from the department of "take 1000 or so macro pictures of honeybees and a few of them will actually turn out."

Posted by: orc at January 22, 2006 7:53 PM

Erm... weren't all the bee flight dynamics solved about four or five years ago? I remember reading about it in New Scientist. *shrugs*

Posted by: Chris Bateman at January 24, 2006 4:25 AM

Orc, wow, it was you who took that bee photo? Right on! What a coincidence!

Chris, I'd wondered that myself, but preferred to credulously believe a Bold New Discovery had been made, heh.

Posted by: Clive at January 24, 2006 11:21 AM

It's the curse of publishing lots of pictures; google picks them up and they start spreading around, mostly without attribution. If I was a professional photographer, my weblog would short many thousands of word-equivalent, but as it is, eh, it can't really be helped and there's no point being selfish.

I don't have nearly the vision (or the reflexes!) needed to take good macro pictures of things in the wild, and bees are almost the most difficult to photograph on the move. I'm not kidding about the "1000 or so macro pictures", either, and I still don't have any good bee-frozen-in-the-air pictures.

Posted by: orc at January 25, 2006 7:02 PM

It's a cool story. But understanding how something works scientifically doesn't negate intelligent design. It merely means we know how it works.

Posted by: A thinker at January 27, 2006 8:08 PM