How fuelish is the honey bee?
Is it as fuel-efficient as say, the new Volkswagen that gets an estimated 170 miles per gallon, more MPG than any other vehicle?
National Public Radio recently posted an interesting article on its Web site comparing the VW with the HB (the honey bee, Apis mellifera).
It seems that when the German engineers rolled out their new VW--an 837-pound car with a 2.6-gallon diesel fuel tank--they boasted it could go 416 miles without stopping for gas.
Nice going, but wait just a minute!
"We suggest," wrote NPR author Robert Krulwich, "that Germany's proud engineers take picnic baskets to the nearest springtime hill and meet their energy-efficient masters, honey bees."
Krulwich recalled that in 1957, Canadian scientist Brian Hocking figured out "bee miles to the gallon."
"Experimenters take a bee, give it all the honey it can eat, and then tether it to a pole," Krulwich wrote, adding that this procedure "neither harms nor seems to disturb the bee."
Whew!
So, our busy little bee flies around the pole until it runs out of fuel. "The pole measures the distance flown by the rotating bee," Krulwich explained. "Because the experimenter now knows how far a bee can travel on a bee-belly of fuel, you scale up to imagine how far it would go if it had a gallon-sized belly. That's how you calculate Bee Miles Per Gallon."
Hocking's formula: flight efficiency of a bee=0.5 mg per 1 kilometer.
The bee. By far.
The bee gets nearly 5 million miles per gallon, or specifically 4,704,280 MPG.
And that's without packing pollen.
Attached Images:
Honey Bee in Flight
Target: Almond Blossoms