Wondering Wednesday Q & A #23

How do honey bees use their wings to fly?

How do honey bees use their wings to fly?

Have you ever seen a slow motion video of a honeybee flying? This is one of the beautiful results of cheap high speed videography, in my opinion.  We can now actually see how the wings, which are oscillating at 230 beats per second (!), are moving.

The above linked video is stunning, you must check it out! You decide if you want to watch it first, then read what I’ve written, or the other way around. . .

Apparently the question of how honey bees fly has some history to it that I didn't know about before researching it.  The story illustrates the extreme hubris of standard science for the last 150 years or so.  For 70 years it was well understood by scientists that . . . honeybees couldn't fly! This is because the mathematical equations for generating lift in air that by that time had been worked out, and had launched the age of powered human flight,  indicated it was impossible. Honeybees have very small wings relative to their body weight, even when compared to many other insects. And scientists just couldn't explain how they did it! This made many scientists grumpy.  As a reformed former lover of popular science, I take no little pleasure in this goofy situation where supposedly dispassionate scientists take personal offense that something as simple as honeybee flight could elude explanation for so long!   Perish the thought!  At a deeper level, many of us still suffer from the delusion that physical science is a path to knowledge that is going to reveal all of nature’s secrets sooner or later.  Arrogant much?  

Then in 2005, scientists used, you guessed it, high speed videos, to observe honeybee wing motion much like in the YouTube video above. An article about their findings is here. They also performed other experiments, like artificially changing the density of the air by adding some helium, to see how bees would generate more lift when they needed it.

What scientists “discovered”  about honeybee flight surprised them in several ways. (So often scientists these days report “discoveries” that are really just about the fact that they got around to paying attention more closely to the whole phenomenon.)

First, the honeybee oscillates her wings at a constant rate, never changing the speed of her wing motion.  Secondly, the wing does not just flap "up and down". It traces a lemniscate (a "figure eight") in the air.  This lemniscate motion creates vortexes in the air (just like the little eddies created around a canoe paddle, or your hand, in the water). To generate more lift, as when the bee is weighed down by much honey and pollen, she makes the lemniscate form wider and more swoopy. Opening the figure eight creates stronger vortices and therefore more lift. 

So, one should imagine a honeybee in flight as capable with her wing motion of creating what amounts to little tornadoes under, or over, or entirely around, each wing.  The vortices create the lift she needs and she can alter the shape and strength of these tornadoes at will!  It’s an interesting questions to me whether we should imagine these tornadoes as vertically or horizontally oriented.  My guess is it’s the latter.

By the logic of powered flight (which tries to attain maximum lift with the least effort), the honeybee’s undersized wings operate very "inefficiently". Nevertheless they give the honeybee incredible control, including hovering, twisting and maneuvering in mid air with great dexterity.  The fast oscillation of the big wing muscles seems to have another purpose too.  When the bee approaches a flower, she can "buzz" the flower (oscillate her abdominal muscles without moving her wings), which dislodges lots of pollen from the flower, which then sticks to the bee's fuzzy body!

Knowing what I know now, to call what bees have "wings" feels a bit crude to me, actually.  Really they should be called "vortex creators" (vortexitors? I just made that word up!), As they are able to literally sculpt the air around the bee's body to move her through space.  

Vortexes are a pattern of air and water movement that is absolutely fundamental. I've touched on it in previous posts and I'm sure I will again.  In Waldorf circles vortexes have been studied extensively (for example in the excellent book The Vortex of Life by Lawrence Edwards) but it's an obvious core feature of nature that traditional science just can't seem to grasp.  The honeybee wing teaches us that the lemniscate is the proper motion to make to generate vortices to create not powered flight, but living flight. We should perhaps try being a little more humble and just observe and wonder at these masters in flight. 

Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash