Buzz: off. During the solar eclipse that swept across North America last year, a set of 16 monitoring stations recorded bees suddenly going quiet in the period of totality, when the moon completely obscured the sun. Only one buzz was recorded across all of the microphones in the three-minute period surrounding totality.
In August 2017, the moon obscured the sun in a total solar eclipse visible across the US. Candace Galen at the University of Missouri and her colleagues set up microphones in stands of flowers along the path of the eclipse, from Oregon to Missouri, to listen to bee activity.
They found that as the moon moved over the sun’s face, the bees continued buzzing along. But in the period around the total eclipse, the sound, which is created by the bees’ wings as they fly, suddenly dropped off.
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No buzzing
“We had expected that we would see a reduction in activity, but we thought that it would be gradual following the loss of light,” says Galen. “We didn’t expect everything to just go along as usual until totality.”
During totality, the buzzing completely stopped at all 16 microphones. The team recorded sound at each site for three minutes – covering the period of totality that lasted 40 to 160 seconds – and found that only one bee buzzed through the silence. “It could have been slow getting back to the hive, or a bee with particularly good eyesight,” Galen says.
It’s not clear whether the bees flew back home to weather totality, like they do at night, or whether they sheltered in place in flowers, like they do in inclement weather. “Nobody was looking down at the bees on the flowers during totality,” says Galen. “All we can say is what they weren’t doing – they weren’t flying.”
Annals of the Entomological Society of America
