Honey bees use four flexible wings to make short, quick, sweeping movements that create enough lift to fly. This allows the bees to fly despite their aerodynamics being very different from fixed-wing aircraft such as airplanes.
Bees have four wings. They have two pairs. One pair of wings is far smaller than the other, and a casual observer may mistakenly believe that a bee possesses only two wings. The smaller ones are at the back and help steer the bee in flight.
The queen bee uses the wings of the queen bee for flight in only two situations: during nuptial flight and during swarming. Its wings are special because of the special way beekeepers use queen bee wings and the situations in which they use them to fly.
This is an important feature to recognize; many flies disguise themselves as bees, but flies only have one pair of wings. Flies have several forewings (forewings), but the hindwings are small, bulbous balancing organs called halters, so flies appear to have only two wings (Figure 1). The two rear wings of the flies have evolved into club-shaped halters that help the flies balance well while flying. The wings are not true appendages like the six legs, but are thin skeletal extensions that have been substantially modified for flight.
This allows bees (and the wings of other insects) to move as much air as a pair of large, slow wings of birds and bats. Bees certainly don’t fly like airplanes, or even most birds, where they slowly flap their wings up and down. Basically, unlike birds and bats, bees (and other insects don’t have muscles attached directly to their wings (other insects like dragonflies have muscles on their wings, but that’s a story for another blog post!).
Bees Have Relatively Small Wings
Of course, not all insects have developed wings, including groups such as springtails and silverfish. Some insects with large wings, such as dobson flies and antlions, fly relatively poorly, while bees and wasps with smaller wings fly well.
Being relatively large insects, one would expect bees to flap their wings rather slowly and push them in the same wide arc as other flying insects (whose wings cover almost half of the circle). The wings of bees are small enough for their body size that even at 230 beats per second, stiff wings would not be able to fly for bees. Like other winged hymenoptera, bees have four wings and can flap their wings at an average speed of 230 beats per second. Because the wings themselves are controlled by two muscle groups, the bee can control the movements of the bee using various combinations of direct and indirect flight muscles.
When these two sets of indirect muscles work together, contracting and relaxing alternately, the wings themselves rise and fall at an incredibly high speed. As the second set of muscles contract, the ribcage becomes shorter from front to back but higher from top to bottom, which causes the wings to drop. With the front wings shaped in the same plane, the bee uses its large internal muscles in the chest to contract and expand the chest in order to beat much faster than if the muscles were attached directly to each wing, like in dragonflies.
The flight muscles of bees allow the wings to rotate and twist during flight, swinging back and forth. Dragonflies have four independently controlled wings for excellent control in the air, but due to the size of the wings relative to their overall weight, bees use these small wings effectively for speed, but are not as good at acrobatic stunts as dragonflies. did. By flies I mean it’s easier for bees to fly down with their legs than to stuff them under the bees. It’s this higher wing angle that provides enough lift for bees, fruit flies and even hummingbirds to fly.
The Interaction of a Bee’s Tininess and Its Wings
An added benefit of this speed is that, combined with the insects’ small size, the air appears denser to the insect’s wing. This finding was unexpected, as smaller insects usually have to flap their wings faster to compensate for the reduction in aerodynamic performance.
The show suggests that smaller bees must compensate for wing area loss more than larger ones in terms of wing beats, and may make smaller bees more susceptible to wing area loss, especially if bumblebees use the net food gain per wing beat. as their stern currency (suggested by Higginson and Gilbert 2004) or if a higher wing-beat rate results in a higher collision rate.
One possible explanation for this sensitivity to flower density based on size is that, for a given proportional area loss, small bees show a larger increase in wing beat frequency than larger bees.
We predict that bees with worn wings are more likely to be observed at higher densities of piebald, on the grounds that if winged bumblebees incur higher flight costs, they can benefit from reduced flight time and/or wing flapping times to reduce these costs.
The ability to separate pairs of wings allows bees to vibrate their wing muscles and generate heat in the winter. Wings not only help bees fly, they also help bees ventilate the hive, which reduces the moisture content of the honey. The front wing is larger than the rear or rear wing and is used for flight and as a cooling device, while the latter is used to reflect heat, emit pheromones, and cool the hive in hot weather.
