Bees Can Flay Everest Height

NEW DELHI: Mountain bumblebees can fly over Mount Everest, an experiment has found. Two US researchers put bumblebees from high mountains of Sichuan, China in a pressure chamber and withdrew the air inside till it was as thin as at the top of Everest. To their amazement, they found that two bumblebees were still flying around merrily.

These startling findings are published in the journal Biology Letters by Michael Dillon of theUniversity of California and Robert Dudley of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. They describe the experiments they conducted with alpine bumblebees and their theories as to why the bees have such high flying skills.

Bees aren't the best flyers, of course, they can zig-zag around and hop from flower to flower, but they could never compete with most birds or many other insects for that matter. But they are able to do something remarkable nonetheless-fly at extremely high altitude. To discover this remarkable ability, Dillon and Dudley traveled to the mountains of Sichuan, China; once there they captured several specimens of alpine bumblebees who normally live and fly at altitudes of over 10,000 feet. They put the bees (one at a time) into a pressure chamber and then pumper air out to simulate various altitudes. In so doing they found that two of the bees were able to fly around in the chamber in conditions that simulated 29,527 feet.

To better understand how it was that the bees were able to fly under such conditions, each was filmed with a high speed camera and audio recorded (to measure wing beats). In studying the sound and video, the researchers found that the bees did not increase the speed of wing flapping but instead moved them in much deeper arcs, allowing for more scooping of air with each beat.

The research duo suggest the bees high-flying technique is more likely put to a different use in the their natural environment-it would help in moving faster to escape being eaten, and even more perhaps in carrying heavy loads of nectar.

Still a mystery is how the bees were able to maintain their wing flapping with far less oxygen to breathe-their metabolisms normally run much faster than most creatures-with less oxygen in the pressure tank, they should have literally run out of breath. Dillon and Dudley plan to conduct more experiments with the bees to answer that question.

Source :http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/