According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees dont care what humans think is impossible.
Post
We DO understand how bees fly. First and foremost, we know that linear approximations (which ignore things like stalled airflow) must be wrong — since they say that bumblebees can't fly. Therefore, you need to do the full aerodynamic treatment. What you discover, if you do this -
-in which bumblebees simultaneously flap and rotate their wings during an oscillation cycle creates a dynamic stall above their wings, which in turn leads to a large-scale "leading edge vortex" being generated on the upper side of the wing. This vortex (temporarily) produces sig-
-nificantly larger lift than the linear approximation allows. In addition, bees are helped because of their small size, which means the Reynolds number associated with their flight puts them firmly in the regime where the fluid is incredibly viscous. In short, because they are s-
-o small, and their wings are moving so rapidly, the air around their wings act like thick syrup, which allows them to generate much more lift than we, on a totally different scale, would normally intuitively predict.
fun fact. the female bees do all the work outside the hive. while the males stay in the hive to do ... stuff... with the queen. so the bee movie is incorrect becuase male bees dont go outside the hive.