There was a report this morning of endangerment for the Rusty Patch Bumblebee as there's significant concern it will go extinct. (CNN: Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered)
The story about endangerment led to WIKI for the science because we don't trust CNN, well, for much of anything. (WIKI: Bumblebee)
Note: part of the mistrust for CNN is due to the way they have been hyping an imminent loss of animal diversity as if it's news but the only thing we learn from that is it sure took them one hell of a long time to notice.
Amuse yourself for a moment considering the comedy of CNN reporter yokels choking on their Corn Flakes as they try to say the words, 'President Trump.'
As part of the explanation for the decline of the Rusty Patch Bumblebee, we saw it was attributed to the loss of habitat but there wasn't much explanation and we haven't found one yet. Why don't they move somewhere else and we saw exactly that with fish on the Atlantic coast which have moved North because they want colder water than global warming is bringing them so why don't bumblebees do it too. (Ithaka: Fish Already Know About Global Warming)
We're as green as you want at the Rockhouse and see it as a fair question: bumblebees can fly so why not move. One answer may be the food on which they like to forage is not there yet but it doesn't seem likely since plants migrate too and many of them can move as fast as the wind with their seeds.
We don't have an answer on that but we did find some other cool stuff about them.
There's a cuckoo bumblee and normally we like bumblebees because they seem so goofy but they usually won't sting us. The cuckoo bumblee is completely different since it behaves in the same way as avian cuckoos by robbing other nests. The juvenile queen cuckoo bumblebee will locate the nest for bumblebees of another species and then kill or subjugate the queen so she can take it over.
Note: starlings also rob nests and that's why a flight of starlings only makes us think of the need for a concussion grenade to discover how many we can drop at once. They're hugely invasive and destructive.
We're sure you see a thousand political segues from this nest robbing but we'll skip that and move along. There's more reading on the cuckoo bumblebee in the WIKI.
There was intrigue on discovering many bumblebees live underground and that sounded so unusual we needed more. While the following segment may have lifted more from WIKI than 'fair use' justifies but in this segment the chase went all over the place since this required some review of the bumblebee life cycle. The unusual part from that is many bumblebee queens weather the Winter aboveground and it gets more unusual than that since they go into a form of hibernation. All of that sounds as impossible as bumblebee flight but these bugs are all over the world and the only countries which lack them are Africa and Australia.
As to the matter of a bumble bee's wings are too small to permit flight, they tried to discover who came up with the idea and the trail is beautiful.
According to 20th-century folklore, the laws of aerodynamics prove the bumblebee should be incapable of flight, as it does not have the capacity (in terms of wing size or beats per second) to achieve flight with the degree of wing loading necessary.
Supposedly someone did a back of the envelope calculation, taking the weight of a bumblebee and its wing area into account, and worked out that if it only flies at a couple of metres per second, the wings wouldn't produce enough lift to hold the bee up,' explains Charlie Ellington, Professor of Animal Mechanics at Cambridge University.
The origin of this claim has been difficult to pin down with any certainty. John H. McMasters recounted an anecdote about an unnamed Swiss aerodynamicist at a dinner party who performed some rough calculations and concluded, presumably in jest, that according to the equations, bumblebees cannot fly. In later years, McMasters has backed away from this origin, suggesting there could be multiple sources, and the earliest he has found was a reference in the 1934 book Le Vol des Insectes by French entomologist Antoine Magnan(1881–1938); they had applied the equations of air resistance to insects and found their flight was impossible, but "One shouldn't be surprised that the results of the calculations don't square with reality".
The following passage appears in the introduction to Le Vol des Insectes:
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.
This translates to:
First prompted by what is done in aviation, I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived, with Mr. Sainte-Laguë, at this conclusion that their flight is impossible.
Magnan refers to his assistant André Sainte-Laguë. Some credit physicist Ludwig Prandtl (1875–1953) of the University of Göttingen in Germany with popularizing the idea. Others say Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob Ackeret (1898–1981) did the calculations.
The calculations that purported to show that bumblebees cannot fly are based upon a simplified linear treatment of oscillating aerofoils. The method assumes small amplitude oscillations without flow separation. This ignores the effect of dynamic stall (an airflow separation inducing a large vortex above the wing), which briefly produces several times the lift of the aerofoil in regular flight. More sophisticated aerodynamic analysis shows the bumblebee can fly because its wings encounter dynamic stall in every oscillation cycle.
Additionally, John Maynard Smith, a noted biologist with a strong background in aeronautics, has pointed out that bumblebees would not be expected to sustain flight, as they would need to generate too much power given their tiny wing area. However, in aerodynamics experiments with other insects, he found that viscosity at the scale of small insects meant even their small wings can move a very large volume of air relative to their size, and this reduces the power required to sustain flight by an order of magnitude.
The story about endangerment led to WIKI for the science because we don't trust CNN, well, for much of anything. (WIKI: Bumblebee)
Note: part of the mistrust for CNN is due to the way they have been hyping an imminent loss of animal diversity as if it's news but the only thing we learn from that is it sure took them one hell of a long time to notice.
Amuse yourself for a moment considering the comedy of CNN reporter yokels choking on their Corn Flakes as they try to say the words, 'President Trump.'
As part of the explanation for the decline of the Rusty Patch Bumblebee, we saw it was attributed to the loss of habitat but there wasn't much explanation and we haven't found one yet. Why don't they move somewhere else and we saw exactly that with fish on the Atlantic coast which have moved North because they want colder water than global warming is bringing them so why don't bumblebees do it too. (Ithaka: Fish Already Know About Global Warming)
We're as green as you want at the Rockhouse and see it as a fair question: bumblebees can fly so why not move. One answer may be the food on which they like to forage is not there yet but it doesn't seem likely since plants migrate too and many of them can move as fast as the wind with their seeds.
We don't have an answer on that but we did find some other cool stuff about them.
There's a cuckoo bumblee and normally we like bumblebees because they seem so goofy but they usually won't sting us. The cuckoo bumblee is completely different since it behaves in the same way as avian cuckoos by robbing other nests. The juvenile queen cuckoo bumblebee will locate the nest for bumblebees of another species and then kill or subjugate the queen so she can take it over.
Note: starlings also rob nests and that's why a flight of starlings only makes us think of the need for a concussion grenade to discover how many we can drop at once. They're hugely invasive and destructive.
We're sure you see a thousand political segues from this nest robbing but we'll skip that and move along. There's more reading on the cuckoo bumblebee in the WIKI.
There was intrigue on discovering many bumblebees live underground and that sounded so unusual we needed more. While the following segment may have lifted more from WIKI than 'fair use' justifies but in this segment the chase went all over the place since this required some review of the bumblebee life cycle. The unusual part from that is many bumblebee queens weather the Winter aboveground and it gets more unusual than that since they go into a form of hibernation. All of that sounds as impossible as bumblebee flight but these bugs are all over the world and the only countries which lack them are Africa and Australia.
As to the matter of a bumble bee's wings are too small to permit flight, they tried to discover who came up with the idea and the trail is beautiful.
According to 20th-century folklore, the laws of aerodynamics prove the bumblebee should be incapable of flight, as it does not have the capacity (in terms of wing size or beats per second) to achieve flight with the degree of wing loading necessary.
Supposedly someone did a back of the envelope calculation, taking the weight of a bumblebee and its wing area into account, and worked out that if it only flies at a couple of metres per second, the wings wouldn't produce enough lift to hold the bee up,' explains Charlie Ellington, Professor of Animal Mechanics at Cambridge University.
The origin of this claim has been difficult to pin down with any certainty. John H. McMasters recounted an anecdote about an unnamed Swiss aerodynamicist at a dinner party who performed some rough calculations and concluded, presumably in jest, that according to the equations, bumblebees cannot fly. In later years, McMasters has backed away from this origin, suggesting there could be multiple sources, and the earliest he has found was a reference in the 1934 book Le Vol des Insectes by French entomologist Antoine Magnan(1881–1938); they had applied the equations of air resistance to insects and found their flight was impossible, but "One shouldn't be surprised that the results of the calculations don't square with reality".
The following passage appears in the introduction to Le Vol des Insectes:
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.
This translates to:
First prompted by what is done in aviation, I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived, with Mr. Sainte-Laguë, at this conclusion that their flight is impossible.
Magnan refers to his assistant André Sainte-Laguë. Some credit physicist Ludwig Prandtl (1875–1953) of the University of Göttingen in Germany with popularizing the idea. Others say Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob Ackeret (1898–1981) did the calculations.
The calculations that purported to show that bumblebees cannot fly are based upon a simplified linear treatment of oscillating aerofoils. The method assumes small amplitude oscillations without flow separation. This ignores the effect of dynamic stall (an airflow separation inducing a large vortex above the wing), which briefly produces several times the lift of the aerofoil in regular flight. More sophisticated aerodynamic analysis shows the bumblebee can fly because its wings encounter dynamic stall in every oscillation cycle.
Additionally, John Maynard Smith, a noted biologist with a strong background in aeronautics, has pointed out that bumblebees would not be expected to sustain flight, as they would need to generate too much power given their tiny wing area. However, in aerodynamics experiments with other insects, he found that viscosity at the scale of small insects meant even their small wings can move a very large volume of air relative to their size, and this reduces the power required to sustain flight by an order of magnitude.
- WIKI
Note: 'wing loading' is computed by dividing the mass of the aircraft by the surface area of the wings and a glider has low wing loading. Conversely, an A380 has extremely high wing loading and classifies about the same for gliding as a granite boulder.
No comments:
Post a Comment