"According to all known laws
of aviation, there is no way that a bee
should be able to fly. Its wings are too
small to get its fat little body off the
ground. The bee, of course, flies
anyway. Because bees don't care what
humans think is impossible."
In
the early 1930s, entomologists August Magnan
and Andre Sainte-Lague essentially made the
same claim as the quote from DreamWorks
Animation's 2007 motion picture, The Bee
Movie: that according to standard
aerodynamic theory, bees should not be able to
fly because their wings are far too small
compared to their body size (Dickinson,
2020). They were trying to compare the
flight of bees to the way that other flying
species fly, which is in an up-and-down motion
(Phillips,
2005). If flight was determined by this
standard understanding, then Magnan,
Sainte-Lague, and other scientists would be
correct in that bees should not be able to
fly. This begs the question of, "if bees are
heavy AND they have short/small wings, how are
they able to fly?"
Research done by Dr. Michael Dickinson and his
team at Caltech found that the secret of bee
flight is in the different way that bees (and
other insects) flap their wings. Bees flap
their wings in a back-and-forth motion that is
simultaneously rotating, creating enough lift
force to make the bee airborne.
