In the 1930’s, a French scientist declared that it should be impossible for bees to fly and for many years, scientists struggled to explain the physics behind how bees are able to generate enough lift to get off the ground. But it turns out that rather than flapping their wings up and down like a bird, bees instead beat their wings backwards and forwards at about 230 times a second, which is fast enough to create a mini vortex, a bit like a tiny hurricane, and this generates lift. So they are actually more like tiny helicopters.
Bees fly at about 15mph, so in theory, a human can outrun them. But some bees are quite persistent and will sometimes chase humans for up to half a mile, so running isn’t necessarily going to work. One option, which always works well in cartoons, is to jump into a lake or river, but apparently, bees will often just wait for you to come up for air.
Another option to make sure you don’t get stung is to always travel with someone you can outrun. And it turns out that the fatter they are, the better, as apparently humans can survive about 10 stings per pound of body weight, so any extra timber they are carrying will help them survive the stings.
When a bee stings, it releases an alarm pheromone called isoamyl acetate, which tells other bees to attack. The same chemical is found in bananas, so eating bananas near beehives isn’t a very good idea.
Apparently, there is a world record for the highest number of bee stings survived by a human, so if you want to give it a try, then you need to survive over 2,400, but bear in mind that most humans die after about 1,000.
Honeybee hives contain a queen, the female worker bees, and the male drones. The male honeybees don’t have stings, so bee stings are by females and almost all of those are by the female worker bees, as the queen rarely leaves the hive. The queen has a sting with no barbs, which means she can sting as many times as she likes without risk of dying, but unfortunately, she doesn’t really get to enjoy the power, as most of the time she is too fat to fly, so she can only really sting nearby relatives.
If a mouse enters a beehive looking for honey, then the worker bees will often sting it to death. But the bees then have a problem as the body is too heavy to move, so they risk ending up with a rotting mouse corpse in their living room, which would spread disease. However bees solved this problem by creating an antiseptic chemical called propolis, which they use to cover the corpse and completely seal it in. This is supposedly where the Egyptians got the idea of mummification from. Bee propolis is pretty cool as it fights viruses, infections and bacteria, and has been suggested as a possible alternative to antibiotics, which could help with the the current worldwide problem of increased resistance to antibiotics.
If you do annoy a bee, then the bee might actually be able to remember your face. Despite having only 1 million neurons compared to a human’s 100 billion, bees can identify and distinguish between different faces.
Scientists trained bees to associate sugar with pictures of particular faces and when tested they picked the correct face over 70% of the time. If they can work out how bees do it, it might help computer image recognition as bees are able to do it with very little compute power.
So it turns out bees invented the first helicopters, may have a solution to antibiotic resistance, probably invented mummification, and may hold the secrets to next generation computer vision.
