Heh… funny excerpt from the bees page at Wikipedia:
In 2005 Michael Dickinson and his Caltech colleagues studied honey bee flight with the assistance of high-speed cinematography and a giant robotic mock-up of a bee wing, which “proves bees can fly, thank God”.
The rest of that section explains what Axle and Eambos have heard anecdotally:
In his 1934 French book Le vol des insectes, M. Magnan wrote that he and a Mr. Saint-Lague had applied the equations of air resistance to bumblebees and found that their flight was impossible, but that “One shouldn’t be surprised that the results of the calculations don’t square with reality”.
In 1996 Charlie Ellington at Cambridge University showed that vortices created by many insects’ wings and non-linear effects were a vital source of lift; vortices and non-linear phenomena are notoriously difficult areas of hydrodynamics, which has made for slow progress in theoretical understanding of insect flight.