If their honey-making and pollination prowess weren’t enough, there’s a new reason to appreciate honeybees : They’re world-class surfers.

Beyond pollinating flowers, worker bees — which are all females — are given the job of searching for water to cool their hives. But if they fall into ponds, their wings get wet and can’t be used to fly. A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology found that when bees drop into bodies of water, they can use their wings to generate ripples and glide toward land — like surfers who create and then ride their own waves.

Gnarly, right?

“When they fall in the water, they have to find a way to get to shore as a matter of survival,” said Chris Roh, a Caltech research engineer and lead author of the study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s a ‘to bee or not to bee’ situation.”

As with many scientific advances — Isaac Newton’s apple or Benjamin Franklin’s lightning bolt — Dr . Roh’s experiment began with a walk. Passing Caltech’s Millikan Pond in 2016, he observed a bee on the water’s surface generating waves. He wondered how an insect known for flight could propel through water.