Flight of the bumblebee

​It was quite windy yesterday the weather report for Betchworth informed me that the winds would be up to 28km/ph with gusts at higher speeds. I noticed that inspite of the wind, the bees were still flying and managing to land and forage on the swaying teasles. I wondered what wind speeds stopped bumblebees from flying and came across a study which said that bumble bees are reluctant to fly in winds above 32km/ph. 

The bigger question is how do bumblebees manage to fly at all? Despite their chunky bodies and tiny wings, bumblebees are brilliant flyers—and their flight mechanics are a marvel of nature and physics. Bumblebees don’t flap their wings up and down like birds. Instead, they sweep them back and forth in a figure-eight pattern, which creates swirling air vortices that generate lift. Their wings beat incredibly fast—up to 200 times per second! This rapid motion helps them stay airborne even with their bulky bodies. Their flight muscles don’t rely on individual nerve signals for each beat. Instead, they vibrate like a plucked rubber band, allowing for sustained rapid flapping, and, unlike other insects that use wide arcs, bumblebees use short strokes combined with rapid rotation at the end of each stroke to maximize lift. This video made by the Smithonian Institute explains the mechanisms of bee flight.

Scientists at Harvard glued tiny markers on bumblebees and recorded them at 1,000 frames per second as they flew in a small wind tunnel in steady and turbulent air. They analyzed the flights in detail by using the tilt of the marker and found that the bees were blown side to side much more easily than up and down. The bees were experts at rolling while flying so were able to correct their flight path more easily. ​I searched on Youtube to find out more about how bees fly and came across this interesting BBC video which tracked the flight of bumblebees using radar. The insight it gives is that bees fly in straight lines bee-lines!– even in high winds.

NJ assisted by chatgpt