The Mythbusters Would be Proud

I'm sure that you've heard that bees are physically incapable of flight, but that they don't know that, so they fly anyway. You may have enjoyed the romantic, little-engine-that-could moral of the story, but I've always firmly believed that it was a bunch of nonsense. Now, some aeronautical engineers at Caltech are reporting experiments that don't just prove that bees can fly---the simple fact that bees do fly proves they can---but also shows how they do. (The short explanation is that they produce more lift than previously realized.) So, all you romantics and irrational optimists out there can stick that in your pipe and smoke it.