Of course bumblebees can fly!

Of course bumblebees can fly!

Perhaps you have heard someone say that scientists have proved that bumblebees cannot fly. Speakers often bring up this point to inspire their audiences. They say that the bumblebee does not know that science has proven him incapable so he manages to fly anyway, just as people can outperform society’s expectations and limitations. Others use the claim, and its obvious inaccuracy, to discredit all of “science”, the nebulous abstract entity.

While the speakers’ message is fine, the facts are just ridiculous and they undermine all that science has achieved. We all know that bees can fly! The popular myth that they cannot fly originated when preliminary calculations in the 1930s using rules and formulas based on the flight of man-made objects showed that bees could not generate enough lift to make flight possible. The rules of conventional aerodynamics describe large objects with smooth, rigid, wings that are stationary or in a rotating propeller, such as airplanes and helicopters. Under these assumptions, it is true that scientific calculations and experiments prove that bumblebee flight would be impossible.

But here’s the catch. Bumblebees and other flying insects do not adhere to even one of these four assumptions. So those calculations cannot even come close to modeling real bumblebee flight. They only proved that insects with smooth and rigid wings could not glide. Accounting for these differences, scientists have done much more research on insect flight, and they have discovered a few interesting things. Bumblebees can definitely fly, and scientists can logically account for this flight. Insects generate lift through sources that we never even knew about before recent research. Their wings follow complicated 3D movement and rotation patterns and take advantage of a phenomenon called delayed stall. In this phenomenon, the angle of the wing creates a low pressure vortex on the top of the wing that creates lift. Then the vortex travels along the edge of the wing during the rest of the wing’s stroke, creating even more lift. Also, bees fly under different conditions than we do. Because of their tiny size, the air seems much thicker to them. It would be similar to humans flying through molasses.

So, insects clearly have their own tricks for flying that work very well for them. After all, they have been flying for drastically longer than we have. Our rules for airplane flight just can’t account for their flight methods. When we try to do so, or spread this myth, we just make scientists and their work sound stupid or make insects magical. Neither one is true.