Why Do Bumblebees Fly Into Windows?

Bumblebees are nature’s little fairies. They go from plant to plant, carrying with them the pollen that allows us to enjoy such beautiful flowers. For this reason, bumblebees are important, so it is a great cause of concern when they unknowingly fly into windows, possibly harming themselves.

Why do bumblebees fly into windows? Bumblebees often look for a shaded area to nest, which is why the inside of a house looks so appealing to them. However, bumblebees are unable to notice nor navigate clear windows, which is why when they try to fly inside a house, they unknowingly bump into them.

Sadly, this is a daily struggle that these helpful little creatures are faced with. We should know if this harms the bumblebees in any way or if there is any possible way to help them avoid this issue. But, to answer these questions, we must first look deeper into the minds of bumblebees.

The Anatomy of a Bumblebee

Bumblebees have five eyes. Two large compound eyes at either side of their heads and three small ones on top of their head to assist with orientation. The colors they see are somewhat like that of a human being with the exception that bees cannot see the color red. They do however have the special ability to see ultraviolet light; it is like their superpower. We have a whole article that goes deeper into this visual superpower.

Despite their extraordinary vision, the one thing they cannot detect is the clear, “invisible” nature of windows when they try to fly inside on their mission to find a safe place to nest.

What Are Bumblebees Looking for in Your House?

A good reason why bumblebees and honey bees for that matter are attracted to your house is the search for food. Bumblebees and foraging honey bees spend most of their day out in search of pollen and nectar.

Their flight path in search of these resources can take them around your house, with people often having beautiful flower gardens or vegetable gardens around their houses. When the plants in these gardens are flowering, pollinators including bumblebees are attracted close to the house. Potentially hundreds of bees at a time. The chances of them coming in contact with one of your invisible windows are pretty good.

For worker bumblebees, inadvertent contact with your house is an occupational hazard of gathering pollen and nectar from flowers to keep their colony and especially their queen well nourished.

On the other hand, it is the new queen’s role to find the ideal place to create a home. On average, queen bumblebees live for about a year. They emerge from winter hibernation in the early spring, depending on the temperature. Straight away she seeks nectar from flowers to replenish her energy before getting to the task of searching for a suitable location for a nest.

The conditions that a bumblebee looks for when choosing a place to nest are the following:

• An area largely protected from the elements of the outside world
• Someplace that is shaded and doesn’t get too hot
• Somewhere warm enough to avoid frost

Sound familiar? What bumblebees are looking for inside your house is, in fact, a place to build their house.

The bumblebee is naturally attracted to such places and is definitely keeping an eye out whilst flying. This is why when they stumble across a nice shaded area in that weird cave (your house), they don’t hesitate to fly straight towards it to investigate. However, the clear windows of the house bring their expedition to a screaming halt.

Do Bumblebees Get Hurt When They Fly into Windows?

A bumblebee has two pairs of wings, its main wings are the two at the front, and its auxiliary wings are the two on the back. For them to support their own weight and fly at speeds of up to about 10 miles per hour, a bumblebee has to beat its wings about 200 times per second.

Bumblebee flight is similar to honey bee flight, both are quite extraordinary. We have an article that goes into how bees fly in much more detail (including a video) if you’re interested.

Long story short, despite being such small little creatures, bumblebees can fly at very fast speeds. This means the sound of the bumblebee crashing into the window is louder than you would think for such a small insect. Upon investigation you would expect to see some carnage, for an impact sound like that would be destructive, if not deadly, to the poor little bumblebees body. They are stronger than you might think.

Bumblebees are small, and yes, they go incredibly fast for such a small insect however their light and small body with that velocity does not create enough force for the impact to cause any major damage to the bumblebee.

Bumblebees like many other insects are equipped with body armor in the form of an exoskeleton; this means that, unlike humans, bees have their skeleton outside their bodies rather than inside it. The exoskeleton provides the bumblebee the protection to withstand the force of impact.

Sure, bumping into a window full speed will definitely not feel like a light tap for a bumblebee—it might even be stunned for a few seconds. However, bumping into a window should not kill them or harm them in any significant way.

Is There Any Way to Stop Bumble Bees From Flying Into Windows?

As previously stated, bumblebees look for shaded areas since it is the ideal location for them to nest without having to worry about the nest heating up for too long. And what better-shaded area is there than a human house?

Bees, noticing the nice shaded area from a distance, try to fly into your house to scout and see if it would be a suitable location. However, much like us humans, they sometimes fail to notice clear glass that is blocking their path, which is why they bump into a window, thinking that nothing is stopping them from flying through it.

There is a very effective way of stopping this using window screens. Window screens are nets that go outside your window. They are effective in notifying the bumblebee that there is, in fact, an obstacle stopping it from flying into your house. It will also protect them if the bee does fly into it.

A window screen is very visible to the human eye, which means that it is definitely distinguishable for a bumblebee whose eyes are much smaller than humans. Things that are small for us, such as the linings of the window screen, look much bigger for them.

If the poor bumblebee decides to continue flying directly into the window despite the screen being there, the soft netting of the window screen will certainly soften the impact a lot more than solid glass would.

Stopping bumblebees does not seem to justify investing on a window screen, there are many other reasons why you would want to have one.

Window Screens Help More Than Bees

As previously mentioned, a window screen can assist bumble bees in noticing there is an obstacle between them and your house. It is important to remember that bumblebees are not only creatures that try to fly into your house; birds also try to fly in too.

Birds, much like bumblebees have small bodies (although birds are much bigger), they can fly at relatively high speeds, and they often fail to notice clear glass in front of them. Birds have bigger and thicker bones. In saying this, it does not put them at any less risk than bumblebees. They too will get hurt—not severely, but it will hurt.

Additionally, there are those insects that you want to keep out of your house. Mosquitoes are arguably the most dangerous animal for human beings. They carry all sorts of diseases and are almost everywhere, but a good window screen will ensure they won’t enter your home.

The Wrap Up

Bumblebees are important for the planet, and we must ensure that they can fulfill their mission safely. They can fly at relatively high speeds. They often fail to see clear glass in their attempt to retreat into the shade of your house to nest. They won’t harm themselves too much, thanks to their exoskeleton, but it will definitely stun them.

A window screen is the most efficient method to solve this issue. It will warn most bumblebees to stay away from your window or soften the impact for those that don’t. Additionally, a window screen will serve the same purpose for birds and will keep other nasty insects such as mosquitoes away from your home.

Bees flying into windows

show/hide words to know

Efficient: doing a job or task without wasting time or energy.

Lift: the force acting in an upward direction that helps animals and objects to fly. more

Pulsation: a beating, throbbing, or vibration that is often repetitive.

Rigid: hard and stiff.

Thorax: in general the part of the body between the neck and waist in humans and the central part of an insects body where the legs and wings are attached. more

What’s All the Buzz—How Do Bees Fly?

Have you ever wondered why you hear bees buzzing? Buzzing is the sound of a bee’s beating wings. Bees have two wings on each side of their body, which are held together with comb-like teeth called hamuli. These teeth allow the two wings to act as one large surface and help the bee create greater lift when flying.

Bees have two sets of wings, one larger outer set and one smaller, inner set. Image by Julia Wilkins.

In each set of bee wings, the large and small wing is connected with hamuli, which are kind of like hooked comb teeth. Click to enlarge.

In order to beat these wings, a bee has muscles that cause its thorax to squeeze in two directions: both up-and-down, and left-and-right. The bee alternates these rhythmic thorax pulsations, kind of like how we breathe, but instead of pulling in air, these pulsations cause the bee’s wings to beat back and forth. This also allows bees to beat their wings very quickly and fly.Honey bees can beat their wings over 230 times per second.

The Science of Bee Flight

This animation shows how a bee moves its wings during flight. See the image below for a step-by-step view of the wing path.

Scientists used to think that a bee’s wings were rigid, making bees kind of like little planes that moved hard wings up and down. But bee wings are fairly small for their body size, so even at 230 beats per second, rigid wings wouldn’t be able to let bees fly. For many years, scientists couldn’t understand how it was possible that bees could fly. But then, using high-quality video that could show the bee wing beats in slow motion, they finally figured it out.

Understanding bee wings was key to figuring out how bees could fly. Their wings are not rigid, but twist and rotate during flight. Bee wings make short, quick sweeping motions front and back, front and back. This motion creates enough lift to make it possible for bees to fly.

The path of a bee’s wings during flight. Click for more detail.

Some other insects have a longer motion from front to back and a slower wing beat. The slower beat makes other insects more efficient, meaning they can get more lift with less work.

So why might bees use an inefficient way of flying? Scientists think that the style of flying bees use lets them carry heavy loads when needed. That ability comes in handy a lot for honey bees, who carry nectar and pollen from flowers back to the nest.

Additional images via Wikimedia Commons. Bee hovering at lavender flower by photophilde.

How Do Bees Fly?

How does a bee fly? Could we fly like bees do? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Jack Fraser, Master’s Physics, University of Oxford, on Quora:

«According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that 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 anyways. Because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.»

That’s the quote from the beginning of the Bee Movie , which saw an unexpected and incomprehensible rise to internet meme-dom a couple of years back.

However, this idea — that we don’t understand how bees fly — has been around for far longer, stretching back nearly 80 years.

It is, of course, nonsense.

We do understand how bees fly.

The origin of the myth is uncertain.

A common origin story is that an (unnamed) Swiss physicist was asked by a female attendee at a dinner party how a bumblebee could fly, since they’re so much fatter (relative to their wing size) than things like birds.

The physicist, so the story goes, did some rough calculations on the back of a napkin, and concluded that a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly.

Of course, because he was doing very rough calculations, the physicist made a number of approximations, (depending on the version of the story) the critical approximation is either a fixed-wing approximation (like an aircraft), or a linearised oscillating aerofoil approximation (i.e. small “flapping” motion).

Of course, the conclusion that should be reached by this is that this approximation was invalid. If you use an approximation to prove that X is impossible, but X clearly happens — it’s not that “science can’t explain X”, it’s that you used the wrong approximation!

That nuance, however, often gets lost in the myth — people get too excited about “science not knowing” something, so they ignore the fact that we absolutely do.

So, how does a bumblebee fly?

Well, 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 is that the way 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 significantly larger lift than the linear approximation allows.

In addition, bees are helped because of their small size, which means that the Reynolds number associated with their flight puts them firmly in the regime where the fluid is incredibly viscous.

In short, because they’re so small, and their wings are moving so rapidly, the air around their wings acts like thick syrup (one might even say….honey?) , which allows them to generate much more lift than we, on a totally different scale, would normally intuitively predict.

There is obviously more complicated physics going on than this, but those are the highlights: dynamic stalls producing vortices, and a small enough scale to be in the viscous regime.

As you may notice, this represents some problems for the second part of the question: could we fly like they do?

The answer is no — for a start, humans are far beyond the scale where we can treat air as a viscous fluid in the same fashion that bees do, we’re simply just too big.

To generate the vortices is slightly more plausible (helicopters and such do something qualitatively similar), but quite simply, there’s a very good reason that we don’t have planes that flap their wings as they fly!

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