For years I have often heard people say that bumblebees should not be able to fly. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the bumblebees this as they still fly around unaware of the fact that they are 'aerodynamically incompatible with flight'.
So let's think about it rationally, is the bumblebee too stupid to realize it can't actually fly or are the original mathematical calculations that came up with this theory of non-flight flawed?
Let's 's go back to where this whole thing started. There was this Swiss aerodynamicist, while at a posh dinner, who got talking to a biologist who started asking about the flight of bees. So the aerodynamicist scribbled the calculation on the back of a napkin but, seeing as he was at a dinner party (and therefore possibly on the tipsy side and uninterested in talking shop), he simplified it. He assumed that bees have a smooth, rigid wing, like the wing of an airplane, and he had to guess the weight and wing area of Mr Bee. Shockingly, the calculations suggested that the bee generated insufficient lift to be able to fly, but the aerodynamicist had had enough by this point and went back to partying (OK, I might have just made up that last part).
However, the story spread and unfortunately wasn't taken as a lesson that a mathematical model of something is not the same as the real thing. Anyone who played with a dead bumblebee as a kid (was that just me? It was dead first, promise) will have noticed that their wings are nothing like the wings of a plane. Instead, they are not rigid and they bend and twist during flight. In reality, the beating bee's wings have more similarity with a helicopter rotor than a airplane wing.
A recent model of how rapid oscillations, like those created by a bee flapping its wings 130 times a second, affect the air around them have in fact shown how bumblebees can fly. Insects appear to fly in a sea of vortexes moving against the main current of the air. I'm sure the bees will be glad to know that they don't defy the laws of nature after all.
So, in fact no one ever proved that a bumblebee can't fly. They
simply illustrated that a simple mathematical model is not appropriate
for describing the bumblebee's flight. However, the myth that
a bumblebee can't fly is still flying around, unaware that it,
unlike Mr Bee, is the one that is wrong.
