An actual, flying bee. Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Bee Movie came out in 2007. I have not seen it, but I have seen the memes that took hold several years later, and thus been made aware of its opening lines, which have infuriated me ever since:

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way 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.”

I’ve heard a similar argument from those who — for whatever reason — are looking to poke holes in established scientific theories. My experience is that if you are the sort of person who is inclined to believe that bees somehow disprove physics, I’m probably not going to be able to change your mind.

But I am interested in where this idea comes from, and why it keeps getting repeated. In part, it’s a story about why it’s important to be careful with your assumptions. But mostly, it’s just a bad joke that kind of got out of hand.

First, let’s set the record straight: there is no reason to believe that bees pose insurmountable problems for science. Scientists spend their time developing theories (e.g., a theory of flight), using them to make predictions, and then checking to see if those predictions hold up.

Sometimes they don’t, and that’s fine. Rather than throw up our hands in despair or deny the existence of flying bees, we go back to the drawing board and we make our theory better, until we have one that does adequately explain what we see.

So the bee thing is definitely a myth, but it’s one that’s been around for a long time. In 1989, American Scientist published an article called “The Flight of the Bumblebee and Related Myths of Entomological Engineering,” written by John H. McMasters, an American aeronautical engineer. It’s clear from his tone that this has long been a sore spot for McMasters and his colleagues:

“ . . . one hears the antitechnology jibe aimed at engineers in general and aerodynamicists in particular: “Didn’t an aerodynamicist prove that bumble bees can’t fly?” Whoever this notorious individual was, he has left his legacy for all of us aerodynamicists who follow to wear about our necks like an albatross.”

Indeed. McMasters goes on:

“It is known that the bumblebee story was already circulating in German technical universities in the early 1930s, apparently beginning in the circle of students surrounding our ‘founding father’ Ludwig Prandtl at Göttingen.”

How exactly “it is known” that this is the case is left to the reader’s imagination, and McMasters is pretty cagey about his sources, but he does suggest that “a possible candidate may be” a Swiss professor who “became famous for his pioneering work in supersonic gas dynamics in the 1930s and 1940s”. He does not name this professor, who he notes is deceased, perhaps as a means of protecting his descendants from the accumulated ire of generations of albatross-wearing engineers.

(Side note: the list of famous Swiss aerodynamicists is short. A quick Google search turns up the name of one Jakob Ackeret, who studied with Prandtl in the 1920s and later did a lot of work on supersonic aerodynamics, including proposing using the use of the Mach number. Ackeret died in 1981, seven years before McMasters’ article, and so while I can’t be sure he is the one being referred to, the facts appear to line up nicely.)

Whoever started it, the story of how it happened seems plausible enough. Here’s McMasters again (emphasis mine):

“In the received story, the aerodynamicist was engaged one evening in light dinner-table conversation with a biologist, who asked in passing for enlightenment about the aerodynamic capabilities of the wings of bees and wasps. Intrigued by the question, the aerodynamicist did some preliminary calculations based on the assumption that the wings were more-or-less smooth, flat plates. Because of the very low Reynolds numbers involved, he further assumed that the flow over the wings would be that associated with ordinary laminar boundary layers and thus prone to easy separation . . . the resulting calculations ‘proved’ the bee to be incapable of flight.”

Note the use of the words “assumption” and “assume”, as well as the scare quotes around “proved”.

Insect wings are not, in fact, smooth, flat plates — they have all kinds of bumps, grooves and irregularities that cause the air moving over them to go spinning off in all directions.

More importantly, it’s not at all clear whether the equations in question accounted for the fact that unlike airplanes, insects flap their wings.

Essentially, what the semi-mythical aerodynamicist did was to take equation meant to describe the lift generated by non-flapping, man-made airfoils like airplane wings, and apply it to bees, which use a completely different method to achieve lift.

The result was obviously nonsense: it would be like saying that according to everything we know about internal combustion, dingoes should not be able to achieve the gas mileage that they do.

We have no proof that this scenario really did go down as described, but it’s not hard to imagine that something like it could have, quite possibly more than once.

Another source that is often cited is a passage in a book published in 1934 by French scientist Antoine Magnan, called Le Vol des Insectes. The introduction is said to contain this passage:

“Tout d’abord poussé par ce qui se fait en aviation, j’ai appliqué aux insectes les lois de la résistance de l’air, et je suis arrivé avec M. Sainte-Laguë à cette conclusion que leur vol est impossible.”

which roughly translates to:

“Spurred on by what is now done in aviation, I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived, along with M. Sainte-Laguë, at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.”

I have not been able to track down a copy of Le Vol des Insectes, but it seems almost certain that this remark is meant as a joke.

After all, Monsieur Magnan is writing the introduction to an entire book about how insects fly. Can you really imagine him kicking it off by stating that, as best he has been able to work out, they don’t?

Like the Swiss professor, Magnan and Sainte-Laguë are using an equation designed for a completely different purpose, in this case, to calculate the air resistance experienced by falling objects.

So why are these otherwise intelligent people relying on equations which they know full well are irrelevant to the situation at hand?

One answer may be that in the 1930s, that was all they had. The mathematical models needed to describe all the aerodynamical nuances of insect flight are complex, and took many decades to develop.

The definitive treatment, published in six parts by Charles P. Ellington in 1984, takes up an entire issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and those theories continue to be refined to this day. By contrast, the equations for airfoils and wind resistance are simple enough to work out on the back of a napkin.

But another reason for this wilful obtuseness may be simpler: they probably thought it was funny. It reminds me of a passage in one of my favourite books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams:

“Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well, given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

However it got started, the bee joke, such as it was, was quickly shorn of its original context and repeated as fact at dinner parties the world over.

Decades later, it found its way into a mediocre film and from there, onto the internet, where it continued to metastasize. To the extent the myth is actually believed, it’s probably because it affirms people’s preexisting beliefs, or because it’s never occurred to them to check whether or not it’s true.

It’s definitely too late to put this genie back in the bottle. But if you’ve read this far, you may be wondering what we can do to prevent the next suspicious factoid from gaining more currency than it deserves. Here are three suggestions:

  • Stop the spread — If you hear an interesting fact from someone at a dinner party, take a few seconds to consider the source before unquestioningly passing it on to someone else.
  • Do your homework — If you have more than a few seconds, do some basic research on Snopes or Wikipedia. You may not learn whether or not the thing you heard is true, but you will probably learn where the idea came from, which will tell you something about its worth.
  • Be patient — Many areas of science today are in the state that aerodynamics was in the 1930s; we can explain some phenomena, but we are aware of examples demonstrating that our models are at least partly wrong. Rather than throwing out science entirely, try to give the scientists time to work out a stronger theory. Even better, join in yourself. It’s fun!

With a little effort, you can avoid getting stung again.

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