Buzz Kill

In “Pep Personified” [The Rakish Angle, November], Nancy Nelson’s husband explains that he gives his wife bee-themed jewelry as a private joke, because, “Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly … but the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just soars merrily along.”
At the risk of depressing the sales of the bee-themed jewelry industry, I’d have to argue that the idea that any scientists ever seriously believed that bumblebees can’t fly is an urban legend. It can be traced back to a theory proposed in the 1930s by one Andre Saint-Lague, was corrected almost at once (he’d based his calculations on fixed-wing rather than moving-wing models), and has subsequently been debunked again several times— but, like all such legends, it refuses to die.