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Bee flight

Bees can't possibly fly, they're too heavy to pull it off with those short wings. But they do fly, and an insect flight expert at Caltech has filmed bee flight in slow motion (5MB .avi) to figure out how it works. [Link]

Dickinson and his colleagues filmed hovering bees at 6000 frames per second, and plotted the unusual pattern of wing beats. The wing sweeps back in a 90˚ arc, then flips over as it returns – an incredible 230 times a second. The team made a robot to scale to measure the forces involved. See a video of a bee in a flap, here (5MB, .avi format).

It is the more exotic forces created as the wing changes direction that dominate, says Dickinson. Additional vortices are produced by the rotation of the wing. “It’s like a propeller, where the blade is rotating too,” he says. Also, the wing flaps back into its own wake, which leads to higher forces than flapping in still air. Lastly, there is another peculiar force known as “added-mass force” which peaks at the ends of each stroke and is related to acceleration as the wings’ direction changes.

jon posted this at 9:08 AM
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