What is the closest wing beat frequency per second of a honeybee in flight?

The physics of bee flight perplexed scientists for a long time. In 1934 French entomologist Antoine Magnan and his assistant André Sainte-Lague calculated that bee flight was aerodynamically impossible. The seemingly haphazard flapping of their wings simply shouldn't keep the hefty creatures aloft. However, fly they did.

In time the puzzle was solved with advances in technology of high-speed digital photography (many thousands of frames per second) to snap freeze-frame images of bees in motion. This coupled with advances in laser and robotics technology, made measurement possible.

Being relatively large insects, bees would be expected to beat their wings rather slowly, and to sweep them across the same wide arc as other flying insects (whose wings cover nearly half a circle, typically flapping in arcs of 145° to 165°). Bees do neither. Their wings beat over a short arc of about 90 degrees then flip over as they return, maintaining around 230 beats per second. Fruit flies, in comparison, are one 80th of the size of honeybees, but flap their wings only 200 times a second while mosquitoes flap at a frequency of over 400 beats per second.

The unique, rotational, propeller effect of the honeybee flight dynamics are of great ongoing interest to scientists and engineers in exploring the aerodynamics potential for man-made flying objects.