MIAMI (TWH) – There is a lot of science being reported that is of interest to modern Pagans and Heathens out there, and it is even sweeter when it involves our pollinators. We won’t drone on, so here it is.
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Honeybee swarms can be shocking in more ways than expected. Researchers at the University of Bristol led by Dr. Ellard R Hunting were at a field station in England and studying the weather when they noticed something odd happening to their instruments. The electric field monitors were showing an electric charge in the atmosphere but there were no storms.
Likely skeptical of ghost manifestation and Bermuda Triangle theories, the team took a careful look around and noticed that some of the nearby research hives were swarming. After a careful look at their data, they discovered that honeybee swarms produce an electrical charge, not unlike that of a thunderstorm cloud.
The team published its findings in iScience two weeks ago. They wrote, “We propose a new perspective based on the idea that organisms that inhabit the lower atmosphere can act as a source of atmospheric space charge and associated atmospheric electrical variability.”
They noted that other swarming insects such as locusts can create electrical charge densities that exceeded those of electrical storms. These electrical charges are caused by friction as the insects rub their body parts together in flight, not unlike how rubbing balloons together creates static electricity.
The interdisciplinary team then turned its attention to the honeybee. The researchers set up instruments that record electrical fields and then waited for honeybees. They also set up video cameras to confirm their observations. The team was able to capture the electrical fields of three passing swarms, showing for the first time that honeybees are capable of generating electricity.
They also found as expected that the denser the swarm, the greater the electric charges. The honeybees were able to create charge densities six times greater than dust storms and eight times greater than thunderstorms.
While creating those charge densities is an impressive feat, they are not the same as voltage. Popular Science extended in the calculation and found it would take 50 billion honeybees to power one LED light.
“How insect swarms influence atmospheric electricity depends on their density and size,” says co-author Liam O’Reilly, a biologist at the University of Bristol. “We also calculated the influence of locusts on atmospheric electricity, as locusts swarm on biblical scales, sizing 460 square miles with 80 million locusts in less than a square mile; their influence is likely much greater than honeybees.”
Ellard added, “We only recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that can exist over different spatial scales, ranging from microbes in the soil and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and perhaps the global electric circuit.”
The scientists are not certain about the value of the electric fields to the honeybee, but there is speculation that the electrical charge may help bees carry pollen and possibly signal to other bees what flowers have been previously visited.
If you’ve never seen a swarm, here is a video that explains why bees swarm, and how expert beekeepers go about collecting them.
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Sadder and somewhat more distressing news came from the University of Maryland’s College of Agricultural & Natural Resources this week. Doctoral student Anthony Nearman and Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp published their research in Scientific Reports finding that honeybees are living half as long as observed 50 years ago.
In previous measurements, the median lifespan for a worker western honeybee was 34.4 days. The median lifespan recorded by the researchers is 17.7 days. The bees studied in the past and present were both caged, that is they lived in a controlled environment. They also found that mortality rates for lab-reared bees had also doubled since rearing techniques were standardized for labs some twenty years ago.
“For the most part, honeybees are livestock, so beekeepers and breeders often selectively breed from colonies with desirable traits like disease resistance,” Nearman said.
“In this case, it may be possible that selecting for the outcome of disease resistance was an inadvertent selection for reduced lifespan among individual bees,” he added. “Shorter-lived bees would reduce the probability of spreading disease, so colonies with shorter lived bees would appear healthier.”
Beekeepers have noted reduced lifespans of their colonies and the changes found in this research may mean that field solutions to this problem might be within the bees themselves. Genetic factors may be identified that might lead to breeding programs to improve the lifespan of honeybees.
Honeybee in flight on its way to collect pollen – Image credit: Louise Docker – CC BY 2.0
The researchers noted that experimental honeybees are collected within 24 hours of emerging from their wax pupae in their hives and then kept on a normal diet of sugar water. This meant that lifespan changes were not affected by the result of disease or pesticides, though neither of those causes could be ruled out as factors in the wilds, as it were.
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The Western Ghats of India has become a hive of activity with a new species of cavity-nesting honeybee being identified. Named Apis karinjodian, the species was described in late September in the journal Entomon, a peer-reviewed journal by the Association for Advancement of Entomology.
The last time a new honeybee species was discovered was in 1798 also in India, Apis Indica, marking 224 years since the previous discovery. The identification of A. karinjodian means that there are now a total of 11 species of cluster honeybees in the world.
The new species has a range covering the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and Goa. It is hoped that the new species will positively impact Indian apiculture by producing higher quality honey than the other current endemic species and offering other products from beehives such as wax and the highly sought-after propolis and royal jelly. The new species will be known colloquially as the Indian black honeybee.
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LONDON – The honeybees adorable cousins, bumblebees, also made scientific news last week with the new buzz that they like toys. Behavioral ecologist and Ph.D. student Samadi Galpayage and her team of researchers from the Queen Mary University of London published evidence in Animal Behavior last week suggesting that bumblebees like to play and experience positive “feelings.”
The team studied 45 bumblebees in an area and gave them “options of walking through an unobstructed path to reach a feeding area or deviating from this path into the areas with wooden balls.” They found that, “Individual bees rolled balls between 1 and, impressively, 117 times over the experiment.”
The repeated behavior implies that the ball rolling was somehow rewarding for the bumblebees.
The team then conducted a second experiment where 45 bees were given the option of entering two chambers: one with balls, and the other without any objects. The chambers were also painted in separate colors. When the balls were removed, the bumbles showed a preference for the chamber with the color that previously held the balls.
There was no other incentive to choose the chamber of a specific color other than it previously had the balls. Nor was there any other purpose to the ball-rolling other than play. “Rolling balls did not contribute to survival strategies, such as gaining food, clearing clutter, or mating and was done under stress-free conditions.”
Professor Lars Chittka, the head of the laboratory where the research was conducted said, “This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine…We are producing ever-increasing amounts of evidence backing up the need to do all we can to protect insects that are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be.”
Galpayage said in a statement, “It is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. They approach and manipulate these ‘toys’ again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings. They may actually experience some kind of positive emotional states, even if rudimentary, like other larger fluffy, or not so fluffy, animals do. This sort of finding has implications to our understanding of sentience and welfare of insects and will, hopefully, encourage us to respect and protect life on Earth ever more.”
There’s even a video:
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