Bumblebees studied for the secrets of flying in bad weather

BBC : Flying micro-robots have difficulty remaining airborne in anything other than still air. With a wingspan of less than 25 cm (10 in), they try to mimic insect and bird flight. To better understand how insects manage to fly even in extreme wind conditions, Sridhar Ravi of Harvard University and his colleagues filmed bees in wind tunnels. Using a high-speed camera, they recorded the bees to try to determine how they responded to changes in wind speed and direction. The film revealed that in an unsteady wind, the bees slowed down in order to gain more time to apply course corrections. And the bees were much more stable vertically than horizontally—lateral wind shifts caused the bees to roll more than did vertical wind shifts. The exact mechanisms involved in the bees’ responses to wind conditions are still unclear, but Ravi plans to study the effect that carrying pollen or honey has on the bees, as well as the flight of other insects in similar wind conditions.