It is a myth that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly... that they can't fly, well, that's a fallacy since you can watch them fly with your own eyes.  Interesting stories behind the myth though.

Since the myth became propogated by the media and general public with no facts to support it, for the longest time people just couldn't understand how these big fat aerodynamically impaired insects could get off the ground using such proportionally itty-bitty wings.  Finally, scientists realized that there was much more involved, and in the past few years much headway has been made in understanding the bumblebee flight phenomenon.  It has something to do with the way they use their wings and the lift generated by vortices that swirl behind the moving wing edges.

Here is a neat link abount a researcher who utilized lasers to study bee flight:  http://physicsweb.org/article/news/5/10/9

An interesting thread discussing the origin of the myth:  http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/98/bees

Brief description of insect flight and how lift helps them fly: http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item223.htm

Glad you liked them... I had fun looking them up.  I think bees are way cool.  

I guess some new research has come in regarding their behavior when foraging bees come back to the hive.  Guard bees smell the forager bees to make sure they belong to the hive before they can be let in.  Foragers increase their body temperature up to 12 degrees during this greeting period.  It's hypothesized that the temperature increase makes their pheromones more volatile, and more easily sniffed.

That's such a lie! It is not a myth! They have done years and years of research and they have come to a conclusion, they cannot fly. But that doesn't make sense because we see bees fly. So they have tried to figure out how they fly. Scientists don't just come up with random conclusions to questions with no statistics.

Dr. Kirsten wrote on Jul 18^th, 2002, 3:49pm: