Microscopic Hairs Keep Some Critters Clean by SciFri

It might not be apparent to the naked eye, but bees are remarkably hirsute creatures, carpeted with three million tiny hairs—the same number as a squirrel. And in the insect world (as opposed to the dog world), all those hairs help to keep creatures clean. The bee’s legs are “like feather dusters,” says David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech. When those leg hairs brush hairs elsewhere on the body, they can catapult dust away from the bee at 1,000 times the speed of gravity. Hu says these tricks of the insect world might help us develop better self-cleaning materials, such as solar panels that dust themselves.