Walking on Caltech's campus, research engineer Chris Roh (MS '13, PhD '17) happened to see a bee stuck in the water of Millikan Pond.
Walking on Caltech's campus, research engineer Chris Roh (MS '13, PhD '17) happened to see a bee stuck in the water of Millikan Pond. Although it was a common-enough sight, it led Roh and his advisor, Mory Gharib (PhD '83), to a discovery about the potentially unique way that bees navigate the interface between water and air.
Roh spied the bee during California's years-long drought, when the pond's fountain was turned off and the water was still. The incident occurred around noon, so the overhead sun cast the shadows of the bee—and, more importantly, the waves churned by the flailing bee's efforts—directly onto the bottom of the pool.
As the bee struggled to make its way to the edge of the pond, Roh noticed that the shadows on the pool's bottom showed the amplitude of the waves generated by the bee's wings, as well as the interference pattern created as the waves from each individual wing crashed into each other.
"I was very excited to see this behavior and so I brought the honeybee back to the lab to take a look at it more closely," Roh says.
Read more at California Institute of Technology
Image by David Hablützel from Pixabay
