"Centuries of biological knowledge" certainly CAN be overturned by one mechanical engineer, and ambition has nothing to do with it.

A "scientific consensus" is a crutch for the math-and-science-impaired.  It is often used by politicians, who want to avoid making hard choices, and know that asking for more research will likely defer the problem to the next administration. Anyone who can do the math (and his math is challenging, not impossible) can at least see that winter insulation is a good idea, which should not be a shocker to anyone. 

But while the "Mitchell analysis" is not at all wacky as such models go, the model, like all models, has severe limits, and does not include or even accept that, as plainly stated just a few posts ago, "the mantle bees maintain warm heads and thoraces, but cooler abdomens".  (In a similar vein, if I put my head in the fireplace, and my feet in the freezer, on average, I am very comfortable, but only on average.)  The term "stressful" may be a fair description of the situation for those mantle bees.

I think it is pretty clear that insulated tops will soon be all the rage among the hobby set, but the migratory operations won't need them, as they are in the business of converting diesel fuel into pollination fees and honey, and will move the bees to warmer places in winter.

If there is a measurable and consistent temperature delta across the mantle bees, then the Mitchell model is deficient.  But ALL models are, and deliberately so.

There's a very old joke about a dairy farm that hired a physicist to help improve milk production.  After weeks of work, the physicist told them "I have a solution, but it works only for the case of a spherical cow in a vacuum."  The term "a spherical cow" is a reference to that joke, and anthem about all models being  only shadows of reality that allow us to subject it to mathematical analysis and get approximate answers for narrow applications.  There was even one long-form treatment of this oft-sung aria, where a series of errors were created by making too-simple assumptions about spherical symmetry in "galactic dark-matter haloes", (an artifact that may or may not exist in the first place, or may not take the form of a "halo" around any galaxy, making one question the basis for the concern over "spherical" vs "aspherical").

"Milking the spherical cow – on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates". 
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv1032

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