Honeybees built comb in orbit in 1984, but the experiment left a key question open

As of 5:14 p.m. ET, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026

In April 1984, about 3,400 worker honeybees and a queen flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in a student experiment meant to answer a simple question: Can bees build a normal honeycomb without gravity?

The answer was mostly yes, according to the researchers' 1985 paper in the journal Apidologie. But the comb was not entirely normal, and the researchers were unable to repeat the experiment.

A video posted Sunday by the YouTube channel Inside The Hive TV (@InsideTheHiveTV), titled "They send HONEY BEES to space and Elon Musk might need to send them back," revisits the experiment. GROKsiNEWS.com checked the history against NASA records and the published research.

A high school idea on a shuttle

The experiment was proposed by Dan M. Poskevich of Waverly Central High School in Waverly, Tennessee, through the Shuttle Student Involvement Program. NASA ran the program with the National Science Teachers Association to fly student experiments on shuttle missions. Honeywell built the bee enclosure module, and scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service co-wrote the results.

Challenger flew the mission, STS-41C (originally numbered STS-13), from April 6 to April 13, 1984. The researchers' paper puts the colony at about 3,400 worker bees and a queen. A NASA summary of shuttle experiments lists 3,500 bees, and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, which holds the box, says 3,300.

What the bees did

The bees survived with low mortality, flew inside a small flight chamber and built about 200 square centimeters of comb, roughly 30 square inches, where they stored sugar syrup. Cell density, depth, diameter and wall thickness were similar to comb built in normal gravity.

The difference was in the angle. On Earth, honeybee cells tilt upward by roughly 13 degrees on both faces of the comb. In orbit, on the largest piece of comb, cells on one side angled toward the top of the box and cells on the other side angled toward the floor. In comb built in normal gravity, the cells on each face were parallel.

The queen laid about 35 eggs in the new comb, but they did not survive transfer to a hive after landing. The ISS National Lab, which manages U.S. research on the International Space Station, says none hatched.

The ground comparison also fell short. A control box kept in normal gravity at NASA's Johnson Space Center produced only a small amount of comb during the flight. The paper says temperatures of 21 to 29 degrees Celsius in that box were inadequate for wax-making. The researchers compared the space comb with comb from an earlier trial in normal gravity in September 1983 instead. "Although we were unable to replicate these experiments, some conclusions may be drawn," the authors wrote.

Why the tilt matters

The tilt has long been thought to keep honey from running out of the cells. A 2021 study in Apidologie by Robert Oeder and Dietrich Schwabe tested that idea by hanging combs upside down in hives. The bees still stored honey in them and raised brood in them. When the researchers made bees build comb from the bottom up, the cells still tilted upward. The authors concluded that the tilt follows gravity, not the direction of building. They proposed that it shifts about 10% of the weight of the cell contents onto the comb's central wall, adding strength.

That is consistent with what Challenger's bees did: with no gravity to follow, the tilt lost its consistent direction. The 13-degree figure goes back to a 1966 study of how honeybees sense gravity when building comb, by Hermann Martin and Martin Lindauer.

Bees in space since

Honeybees had flown once before. Shuttle mission STS-3 in March 1982 carried 14 adult worker honeybees in a student insect-flight experiment. They were filmed for about 25 minutes in weightlessness. The ISS National Lab says those bees avoided flying and clung to the walls of their box.

In 2003, the shuttle Columbia carried carpenter bees, which do not build hives, on mission STS-107. That experiment was lost with the shuttle. In 2018, SpaceX's CRS-15 cargo mission carried five alfalfa leafcutter bees, a solitary species, to the space station in a student experiment. Cameras recorded the bees for 30 days. In 2019, two honeybee queens with attendant workers flew on a brief suborbital Blue Origin flight to study queen behavior.

GROKsiNEWS.com found no record of a full honeybee colony spending days in orbit since Challenger, in NASA or ISS National Lab material or the research literature.

The open questions

Launches are far more frequent now than in 1984. SpaceX has flown more than 115 Falcon missions so far in 2026, close to three a week on average, according to a public launch tally. Neither SpaceX nor NASA has announced plans to fly a honeybee colony.

The 1984 results leave questions that a new experiment could take up. Ideas for a redo, which are proposals rather than announced plans, include:

• flying a twin colony in a centrifuge that simulates Earth gravity on the same flight, as a better control;
• keeping colonies up for weeks instead of days, to see whether eggs develop;
• adding cameras and flying several colonies;
• testing comb-building under Mars-level gravity.

Whether bees could ever pollinate crops for people living on Mars is still an open question. No mission has tested it.