Flight Of A Bumblebee [REPACK]
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SWAN-BIRD:Well, now, my bumblebee, go on a spree,catch up with the ship on the sea,go down secretly,get deep into a crack.Good luck, Gvidon, fly,only do not stay long!(The bumblebee flies away.)
Short and stubby, the bumblebee doesn't look very flight-worthy. Indeed, in the 1930s, French entomologist August Magnan even noted that the insect's flight is actually impossible, a notion that has stuck in popular consciousness since then.
Now, you don't need to be a scientist to raise an eyebrow at this assertion, but it sure is easier to explain the bumblebee's physics-defying aerodynamics if you're Michael Dickinson, a professor of biology and insect flight expert at the University of Washington.
Dickinson published a 2005 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the flight of the bumblebee after gathering data using high-speed photography of actual flying bees and force sensors on a larger-than-life robotic bee wing flapping around in mineral oil. He says the big misconception about insect flight and perhaps what tripped up Magnan is the belief that bumblebees flap their wings up and down. "Actually, with rare exceptions, they flap their wings back and forth," Magnan said.
The fluid dynamics behind bumblebees' flight are different from those that allow a plane to fly. An airplane's wing forces air down, which in turn pushes the wing (and the plane it's attached to) upward. For bugs, it isn't so simple. The wing sweeping is a bit like a partial spin of a "somewhat crappy" helicopter propeller, Dickinson said, but the angle to the wing also creates vortices in the airlike small hurricanes. The eyes of those mini-hurricanes have lower pressure than the surrounding air, so, keeping those eddies of air above its wings helps the bee stay aloft.
In some sense, the story has done its share to inspire further research. In recent years, scientists have tackled the problem of insect flight from a number of different angles and gained new insights into the complexities of powered flight.
Bumblebees are remarkable navigators. While their flight paths may look scattered to the casual eye, all that buzzing about is anything but random. Like the travelling salesman in the famous mathematical problem of how to take the shortest path along multiple stops, bumblebees quickly find efficient routes among flowers. And once they find a good route, they stick to it. The same goes for other animals from hummingbirds to bats to primates that depend on patchy resources such as nectar and fruit. Perhaps this is not such a surprising feat for animals with relatively high brain power. But how do bumblebees, with their tiny brains, manage it As new research in this issue of PLOS Biology by Lars Chittka and colleagues shows, a simple strategy may be enough for a real-world solution to this complex problem.
To keep the bees' focus on the artificial flowers, the experiments were done in October, when natural sources of nectar and pollen were scarce. To make the bees want to find all five flowers, each sucrose drop was only enough to fill one-fifth of a bumblebee's crop. And to keep the bees from finding one foraging site from another visually, the flowers were arranged in a pentagon that was 50 m on each side, which is more than three times as far as bumblebees can see them.
In addition, the researchers fitted five bees with transponders and tracked them with radar as they developed traplines. This revealed that flight paths between trapline segments were relatively straight and that between their first and last bouts, bees cut their total travel distance by 80% (from 1,953 to 458 m). In contrast to computers, bees did not find the absolute shortest route of 312 m even in this simple experimental arrangement. But they came very close, especially considering that they explored only a small fraction of the possible routes, and established traplines relatively rapidly. This tradeoff between perfection and speed highlights the dif