How high can birds and bees fly?
Dear Straight Dope: How high can a bee fly? Is its flight limited by atmospheric pressure and gravity or would it get tired? Dear Straight Dope: How high can birds fly? It seems to me that birds like sparrows can only fly some meters high. So what would happen if we threw a sparrow out of an airplane (or a hot air balloon)? Would it fall down to its regular height or stay high? — Johnpaul; Dirk Beyers from Belguim We always knew someday we’d have to explain about the birds and the bees. Bees can fly much higher than they do, so we don’t really know the upper limit. If we go by the altitude at which bees occur, they get into the Himalayas, so we can say that some species will fly in areas that are thousands of feet above mean sea level. If there’s anything that seems to be a limiting factor, it’s temperature. Bees have very high body temperatures (a honeybee drone, for example, has a thoracic temperature of about 125 degrees F while flying), and they can’t sustain themselves long if the
