Can bees fly in zero gravity?

Yes, a tad late I know, but I am late for most things. Happy New Year one and all; here's to a year filled with harmony, peace, understanding and goodwill to ...I was about to write 'goodwill to men' as quoted in the bible, but that is no longer PC I guess.

Is 'Mankind' an acceptable substitute I wonder? I think so, after all that doyenne of knowledge Wikipedia (and I am for the purpose of balance making Wiki female) has this to say on the subject: Mankind refers to the human species, Homo sapiens, collectively.

With it being closed season for bug hunting right now, this will be a very different update. None the less entertaining and educative though.

IS it going to be about then JJ?

Well actually it will be like nothing on Earth; because this update is all about...

It was the amazing news of NASA's New Horizons encounter with 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule that got me started on this thought pattern. So many questions came to mind, more of that later, but for now, it eventually led me to wondering about which (if any) bugs have been launched into outer space. Any ideas? Well, this might help: let's explore this together...

Fruit Flies are the staple diet of scientists it seems: I don't mean they eat them! No, they are one of the most studied of all insects it seems. As scientific exploration turned towards the heavens, fruit flies were an obvious choice. Way back in 1947 the United States strapped a few hapless flies to a V-2 rocket, launching them into the limelight as the first animals in space.

I'm not sure of just what scientific information was gleaned from that very first foray, but the purpose of the experiment was to explore the effects of radiation exposure at high altitudes. When the capsule returned the fruit flies were recovered alive.

In 2006 NASA launched the Discovery space shuttle with 15 fruit flies aboard.

It returned safely to Earth 2 weeks later with 3000 fruit flies on board: count 'em...3000! I wonder if anybody did.

To sum up the conclusions of this experiment. It seems that space-flight had affected the flies immune system and that larvae born in space were smaller than those on Earth.

The United States launched Biosatellite I in 1966 and Biosatellite I/II in 1967 with fruit flies, parasitic wasps and flour beetles. 

Parasitic Wasps

In 1968 the Soviet Union sent wine flies and meal worms alongside 2 tortoises. They became the first inhabitants of Earth to travel around the moon.

In April of 1972 Apollo 16 carried nematodes...

A Nematode

1973 saw Skylab 3 become the second manned mission to the space station. Aboard were the first spiders in space. Two garden spiders called Arabella and Anita. The aim of the experiment was to test whether the two spiders would spin webs in space, and, if so, whether these webs would be the same as those that spiders produced on Earth.

The spiders proceeded to construct their web while a camera took photographs and examined the spiders' behavior in a zero gravity environment. Both spiders took a long time to adapt to their weightless existence. However, after a day, Arabella spun the first web in the experimental cage, although it was initially incomplete...

The web was completed the following day. When a second web was constructed, it was more elaborate than the first. Both spiders died during the mission; possibly from dehydration. 

When scientists were given the opportunity to study the webs, they discovered that the space webs were finer than normal Earth webs, and although the patterns of the web were not totally dissimilar, variations were spotted, and there was a definite difference in the characteristics of the web. Additionally, while the webs were finer overall, the space web had variations in thickness in places: some places were slightly thinner, and others slightly thicker. This was unusual, because Earth webs have been observed to have uniform thickness.

In the 1980s the Soviet Union put stick insect eggs into space.

I know newts are not insects, but I included this next entry because I am not sure how I feel about it all: Bion 7 (1985) had 10 newts  on board. The newts had part of their front limbs amputated, to study the rate of regeneration in space, knowledge to understand human recovery from space injuries.

The last Soviet flights in the 1990s included sand-dessert beetles...

Through the 1990s the USA carried crickets, gypsy moth eggs and stick insect eggs.

2003 saw silk-worms, spiders, carpenter bees, harvester ants and nematodes all taking trips into outer space. Following the final, ill-fated flight of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry, some live nematodes were recovered, having survived re-entry.

During their first day in space, some bees attempted to fly, but collided with the  walls. Miraculously, by the end of the seven-day mission, the bees showed complete adaptation to micro-gravity. Crew members noted that bees were able to fly from one place to the other, which suggests that bees are capable of learning.

A “super Florida mosquito” reached orbit as a hitchhiker aboard an Apollo capsule during the Apollo-Soyuz mission. There have also been insect stowaways on the Shuttle.

Finally, British scientists say that alien bugs may have been transported to Earth on space dust. Bugs might have flown across the universe and onto our own planet, scientists have said. And bugs from our own planet might have made the same journey, flying off of Earth and onto other planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

The theory could even help explain how life began here, suggesting that it was carried from elsewhere in space then flourished in Earth.

Returning to the New Horizons venture for just a moment before I take my leave. We have named this distant icy rock Ultima Thule, which a good friend who is a font of knowledge tells me means something like, the furthest distance, or furthest point. But what occurred to me is, what if  another civilization got there first and already named it something different. Would we be prepared to change? 

That led me to wonder about just how our planet came to be known as Earth: who named it? 

This from a website named Ask an Astronomer: Unfortunately, I think it's pretty impossible to say exactly who first named the planet 'Earth'. Actually, I really doubt one person really named it intentionally; rather it developed over time as part of the English language. Earth is Old English and German in origin, related to the Old Saxon 'ertha', the Dutch 'aerde', and the German 'erda'. Terra is a French and Latin word, and so isn't part of the 'Earth' etymology. I'm not really an expert on words and word origins, but it seems likely that people used Earth to mean 'land' and then it was the natural thing to refer to all the land and the planet. I tried to look up more specific details about the specific usage of the word over time, but even the Oxford English Dictionary (online) admits:

"Men's notions of the shape and position of the earth have so greatly changed since Old Teutonic times, while the language of the older notions has long outlived them, that it is very difficult to arrange the senses and applications of the word in any historical order."

So, as with the names of the other planets that have been known throughout human history (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), it's difficult to say who first thought of the planet as Earth. The names were part of culture even before we really understood the significance of what planets are and where they are in space.

Live Science simply says: The handle's creator is unknown.

What we do know is that Earth is the only planet not named after a Roman of Greek god.