A bumblebee's flight pattern and tendencies while airborne have a direct relation to what kind of food they are carrying.
Their work published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers found bumblebees fly differently when carrying nectar, as opposed to pollen. With the latter stored down around the legs, the bees did not have the same level of maneuverability in flight, but they were "more stable," NPR reported.
Andrew Mountcastle, a biologist at Harvard University and the lead author on the new study, told NPR engineers have been trying to understand how bees fly for decades.
"Of course, bumblebees fly in a very different way than airplanes do," he said. "They flap their wings, and their wings bend and twist as they flap them.
"What might be surprising to many people is just how much load they're able to carry... "Bumblebees are basically aerial tankers."
For their work, they tested various bees carrying either pollen or nectar and placed them in environments where they had to land on a robotic flower in various simulated conditions.
When bumblebees carry nectar, they store it in a pouch near their abdomen, but this did not help the insect's stability despite carrying the load at its core. Those bees did have better maneuverability than their counterparts.
"Such a test has never been done," Sridhar Ravi, an aerospace engineer at RMIT University, told ABC Science Online. "It shows there's a trade off between stability and maneuverability."
"So if something is stable it's not going to be maneuverable and if something is maneuverable it's probably not going to be stable."
