>I believe I read somewhere that honeybees were taken on board a
>spacecraft to see how they managed to build comb in the weightless
>environment.
>
>If anyone has details of the mission or knows the source of relevant
>material, I would like to know.
 
Actually, I recall back in 1983, not long after the shuttle flights started
bringing up people's experiments, that someone sent up a "fish tank"
containing flies, moths, and honeybees - to see how they performed in zero
gravity.
        Dave Roubik had a photo of this tank in his lab in Panama, and he
explained it to me one day, that the flies would crawl around, and then
jump and try to fly, sending them *wildly* out of control. The moths were
slower, but just as hopeless, flapping and blundering about. However, the
honeybees, after an initial period of similar clumsiness, figured out how
to keep their wings folded and just *push* against the walls of the tank to
get around. That struck me as pretty convincing evidence that the
behavioral repertoire of the honeybee is not all hard-wired...somehow I
can't imagine anyone postulating that they've been *selected* to exhibit
certain motor patterns in zero gravity. Unless those fellers in the UFOs
brought them to earth originally. ;-)
 
Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82