April 3, 2008


Colony Collapse Disorder

Solitary Bees need not concern themselves with such things, but still, here’s an interesting podcast I was listening to today. It’s got Miranda Mellis towards the end, and Thurston Moore, and some strange woman from another planet talking of our reproductive habits.

Whenever I think of bumble bees, though, I think of something my physics professor told me that made me give up on my PhD… evidently if you study the mechanics of a bumble bee, on paper, it can’t fly.

posted by Derek White in animals 

comments

3 Responses to “Colony Collapse Disorder”

  1. Deron Bauman on April 3rd, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    A friend and I used to yell at bumble bees, telling them that.

  2. Boris on April 4th, 2008 at 3:17 am

    Science shows bumblebees can fly:

    Z. Jane Wang, Two Dimensional Mechanism for Insect Hovering, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85.10, 2216-2219 (2000)

    http://dragonfly.tam.cornell.edu/publications/2000_PRL_Wang_Hv.pdf

  3. Derek White on April 4th, 2008 at 4:46 am

    what, you think if they knew they’d fall to the ground? I started to write a short story once about someone who was revisiting old aerodynamic equations used to engineer airplanes and discovered a mistake or wrong assumption, and the second he discovered that mistake all the airplanes fell to the ground.

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