These bees in space had been in orbit for three days when the crew of the space shuttle Challenger pulled their box out for a live TV broadcast on April 9, 1984. “They moved into the area where the food was (after launch) and they’ve really been going to town,” astronaut James “Ox” van Hoften told viewers. “Right now, they’ve got a great big old honeycomb.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By landing day, those bees in space had built about 200 square centimeters (roughly 30 square inches) of wax comb, and by most measures it could have passed for comb from a backyard hive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Van Hoften and George “Pinky” Nelson thumped on the hive and gave it a shake to see how the bees would react. “Don’t drop that box!” mission controller Jerry Ross warned, United Press International reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nelson figured the bees in orbit were having more fun than their counterparts on the ground. “I guess they like zero-G as much as we do,” he quipped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dan Poskevich came up with the experiment as a student at Waverly Central High School in Waverly, Tennessee, and sent it to NASA’s Shuttle Student Involvement Program. When it flew, he was at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He wanted to know if bees could build honeycombs with no gravity and, in UPI’s words, “if so, whether the bees would construct them with the same hexagonal shape as those on Earth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I’m really excited by what I saw. They did what we wanted them to do,” Poskevich said after the broadcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Honeywell, whose space avionics division in Clearwater, Florida, sponsored the project, had its own interest. James Peterson of Honeywell thought the bees might show how to get the most out of a design that works on Earth once it is built in space, the Christian Science Monitor reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bees weren’t the main event on mission STS-41C. Its five astronauts launched on April 6, released the Long Duration Exposure Facility, fixed the Solar Maximum Mission satellite in orbit and landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on April 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “While the Challenger crew has been occupied repairing a satellite, their honey-bee companions have been busy building a comb,” Robert C. Cowen wrote from Houston for the Monitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Approximately 3400 (0.45 kg) worker bees were introduced with a caged queen into each of two Bee Enclosure Modules,” the scientists who analyzed the comb wrote. That’s about a pound of bees per box, and each box was aluminum, about 18 inches long, with a clear plastic top, wooden frames, a feeder and a tiny flight chamber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their sugar water had agar in it, a gel that “gave the mixture a semi-solid consistency necessary for 0 g.” The second box stayed at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and by the Monday broadcast “the bees kept for comparison in an identical container on the ground had not yet started comb-building,” the Monitor wrote, citing Poskevich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other records round the numbers differently. NASA’s technical summary of shuttle biology experiments<\/a> lists “a colony of 3500 bees,” while the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which keeps the box, says it “housed 3300 honeybees,” the same figure UPI and the Monitor gave in 1984.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the TV feed, the bees had “established what appears to be normal hive activity,” Cowen wrote, and they’d already started “segregating dead bees in an outer compartment of their container.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also noticed where they chose to build, since “the top of the box seems to them to be as good a place for comb construction as does the normal beekeeper’s template inside the box.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA’s 2021 Earth Day poster says the bees “had a little trouble flying in zero gravity,” but “it didn’t take long for them to adjust.” On April 9, according to the paper, “some bees collided with the walls of the chamber.” Four days later the crew saw “directed flights” with no crashes and, in notes the poster quotes, wrote, “No longer trying to fly against top of box. Many actually fly from place to place.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA’s summary even mentions that the bees could “link into a chain of bees 10 inches long.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shuttle and everything in it was falling around Earth the whole time, so gravity never really switched off. Scientists call that microgravity, and researchers have since used it for work like viruses grown in space<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bees had even flown before. NASA’s summary lists a 1982 student experiment on STS-3 that took honeybees, houseflies and moths, and “within a few days many of the insects tended to cling to the walls of the chamber instead of flying.” Other animals went up long before that, among them two Soviet steppe tortoises that circled the Moon in 1968<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The comb was studied by a team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, and the paper on it lists J. D. Vandenberg as first author, with Poskevich and Peterson among the co-authors. Their measurements came out reassuringly ordinary: “Cell densities, depths, diameters and wall thicknesses were all similar whether built at 0 g or 1 g.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n What changed was the slope of the cells. On Earth, the cells on both faces of a comb tilt upward, but on the biggest piece built in orbit, “cells on one side were angled ‘up'” toward the box’s plastic lid while the cells on the other side pointed “down” toward the floor. Another piece, started from the floor of the box, “displayed a wide range of angles.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Although the variation of cell angles with the side of the comb gives a clear indication of disorientation of the bees, other aspects of comb geometry were similar to those of comb built by bees on earth,” the authors write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They summed up the colony this way: “These bees were able to function in an apparently normal manner at 0 g as evidenced by their behavior and survival. Some disorientation during flight was observed, however.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Midway through the flight, van Hoften said only about 20 bees had died, according to UPI. The final tally was about 120 in the flight box and about 350 in the Houston box, whose bees sat near 70\u00b0F (21\u00b0C) for the first part of the flight and built very little comb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malcolm T. Sanford, a bee expert at the University of Florida who advised the project, told the Monitor during the flight that he expected perhaps 100 “space bees” from any eggs the queen laid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did lay about 35, but the paper reports that “these eggs failed to hatch following transfer with bees to standard hive equipment near J.S.C.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors hoped someone would try again with a longer flight “to enable eggs laid by the queen to continue development at 0 g,” though they added that “the opportunity to repeat this experiment or design a related one for a future shuttle mission may be unlikely.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Decades later, Robert Oeder of Marktl, Germany, and Dietrich Schwabe<\/a> of the physics institute at Justus Liebig University Giessen hung empty combs upside down in beehives to test why cells normally tilt upward by about 13 degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Honey was stored in these inverted honeycombs in the same way as in the normally oriented combs, and inverted combs were also well accepted for rearing the brood,” they wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They proposed that the tilt serves “to direct about 10% of the weight of cell contents onto the midwall, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the comb.” The midwall is the thicker central sheet that the cells on both faces share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the Challenger comb, they wrote that the mixed angles were “not surprising, since in weightlessness, no obvious ‘downward movement’ occurs for a honeybee,” and that “gravity on Earth is crucial for the known orientation of the angle of inclination of comb cells.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bees flew once, and the authors were candid that “we were unable to replicate these experiments.” Because the Houston bees built so little, the space comb was compared with comb from a ground trial in September 1983 and from a normal hive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The workers were also about 15 days old and “may have been involved in comb construction prior to this experiment,” which could have shaped the cells. And one week says nothing about whether honey bees<\/a> could keep a colony going in orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA student from Tennessee asked the question<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Thousands of bees rode in a metal box<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Flying took a few days to figure out<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The comb matched Earth’s except for its tilt<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The eggs laid in orbit never hatched<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Later work linked the tilt to gravity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A single flight has clear limits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n