I have heard it said (not very often, mind you) that every Bee in the world currently beating it's wings is defying the laws of physics as we speak. The argument genuinly tends to go along the lines of "if you factor in the weight of a Bee, the surface area of the Bee's wings, and the power available to the Bee from it's flight muscles, the number needed comes up short, and so Bee's should not be able to fly. This has been used as an argument, not neccessarily to bolster a religious belief, but rather, as an argument attempting to make one doubt the abilities of science to provide a complete description of the natural world. After all, what on earth could science possibly know on the origins of the universe, the origins of life, how gravity works, and why the life we observe is so diverse and complex, if it can't even explain the flight of a bee.
I think the argument needs some different, perhaps not as catchy, wording, however. Clearly flying bees don't break the laws of physics, they are clearly able to fly, this can be verified in any number of ways, but I feel that that won't be neccessary. Let's try this: the clear fact that Bees can fly is a natural phenominon that cannot be explained by the current best mathmatical representations of the laws of physics that our best and brightest have been able to prove through objective observation, independant experimentation and vindicated predictions. Boy, that was a mouthfull. But, is this claim true? Is science unable to account for the flight of a Bee? The short answer is, unsuprisingly, no. This argument is completely unsubstantiated, and hasn't been close to valid for decades. And for the long answer, I will tell you why.
You see, when you actually do the equation that I mentioned above, factor in weight, wing span and muscle power, the argument is actually correct in a sense, according to the numbers, the Bee should not be able to fly. However, the predicted accuracy of this equation comes from a very much outdated understanding of aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and flight in general. The alleged origin of this idea was more than 80 years ago, when a biologist and an aerodynamicist got to chatting about insect flight. The aerodynamicist did some calulations and came to conclusion that a Bee did not generate enough lift to be able to fly. However, this potentially revolutionary discovery in the world of biology was debunked by the very same aerodynamicist who came up with the faulty discovery in the first place, some say within hours. The problem was a faulty analogy between the flight of Bees, and the flight of planes. He used the same formula to calculate both. If planes were built the way Bees are, planes would not take off.
The trouble is however that Bees are not like planes, they are like helicopters. A moving airfoil, such as a helicopter blade, or the beating of a Bees wing, creates much more lift than the stationary one you would find on planes. The problem with Bees was not an aerodynamical one, but a mechanical one, namely, just how is it that Bees are able to generate the imcomprehensable speed that their wings beat at: the wings of a Bee beat roughly 200 times a second (if you want the math, it's 12000 times a minute, 720,000 times an hour, 17.3 million times a day, 518 million times a month, 6.22 billion times a year, and (very approximately) 31 billion times in a Bees lifetime. So how do Bees flap those wings so darn fast? The trick is that the Bee's thorax muscles don't expand and contract, so much as they vibrate. These vibrations are caused by nerve impulses that give the muscles a sort of "twang" until the next impulse hits, and so on until everyone is dead.
So, it isn't hard to deduce that the Bee argument just does not come close to holding up, it's been debunked for more than 80 years, but I guess that doesn't stop people jumping on the train without taking the time to notice that the train has passed all it's stops and his careening towards a cliff. Happy Christmas
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