> That's the point. Bees attempt to fly 
> upside down thinking the snow is 
> the sky and end up dead

Reading the paper I cited would leave one with the conclusion that bees
would find it extremely difficult (I dare not say "impossible" or I'll never
hear the end of it) to successfully flip themselves upside down with overt
intent, given their "trim" as "aircraft", the rather large landing gear
weighting down their underside, and their slow airspeed.  Anyone who has
flown anything, even a hang-glider, knows that you need speed to make a turn
or roll, and that both turns and rolls will lose you some serious altitude
in the process of making them.  While bees are not fixed-wing aircraft, they
are subject to the same basic concept of losing lift when presenting less
wing surface to the horizontal.  

In bad wind turbulence, bees can be rocked side-to-side, and cannot overcome
being flipped, so this implies that they lack the power to "do a barrel
roll" to quote the game "Star Fox".  (Type the exact phrase "do a barrel
roll" into Google sometime, and watch what happens.)  Think about it - the
minimum power and airspeed required to invert oneself while in flight would
also be enough power/airspeed to keep oneself from being rocked side-to-side
by turbulence, and/or right oneself when rocked by turbulence.

While bees might fly headfirst into the snow, or dive down in an attempt at
an ill-fated attempt at a loop, there seems to be more than sufficient
evidence on this topic of inverted flying.  Bees apparently can't flip
upside down at all, but they can be rocked by winds, and they will crash
long before getting anywhere near inverted.

So, the bees in the snow that seemed to have crash-landed upside down may
have taken a bounce, which flipped them over, and then the inverted skid,
but there's no flying going on when inverted.  They would slip sideways and
stall before becoming inverted.

So, bees are not "acrobatic aircraft", and don't seem to be able to even
attempt to fly upside down.  They would hit the ground long before pointing
any top-of-head-mounted ocelli at the ground.
Winds clearly can flip them, but it appears that they lack the ability to do
so themselves.


	

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