Whether you learnt this in a classroom, or from that smartass kid in the playground, the "fact" that nobody knows how bees fly probably did the rounds at your school. To be fair, we didn't used to know how bees fly, but then again that's true of anything. Back before the invention of high-speed cameras, there was no real way to actually study the flapping of bees' wings. Back in the 1930s, a Frenchman named Antoine Magnan wrote a book entitled Le Vol des Insectes (The Fight of Insects) that said that insect flight should be impossible. The problem was that he was an aeronautical engineer and was applying the flight mechanisms of planes to the wings of insects. It probably should have been pretty obvious that he was wrong in his assertion that insects can't fly because, well, they can. However, for whatever reason the idea stuck and is still repeated today, despite the fact that we definitely do know how bees fly. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and scientists with a bit too much time on their hands, we know that bees fly by swishing their wings back and forth at high speed, creating little vortices in the air that give them lift.
