A new study suggests that swarming bees can potentially change the weather
Swarming bees produce so much electricity that they can affect the local climate, new research suggests.
The finding, which the researchers made by measuring the electric fields around the bee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in directing dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and even its impact may have to be included in future climate models.
Insects’ tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while foraging, either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (bees can beat their wings more than 230 times per second) or from landing on electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these small loads were previously assumed to be small-scale. Now, a new study, published on October 24 in the iScience magazineshows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.
Related: A single bee is making an army of immortal clones thanks to a genetic fluke
“We have recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that may exist at different spatial scales, ranging from soil microbes and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and the global electric circuit”. first author Ellard Huntinga biologist at the University of Bristol, told Live Science.
Static electricity arises when microscopic bumps and pits on two surfaces rub against each other, causing friction. This causes the electrons, which are negatively charged, to jump from one surface to another, leaving one surface positively charged while the other surface becomes negatively charged. The transfer across the two ionized surfaces creates a voltage difference, or potential gradient, across which charges can jump.
This electrostatic potential gradient, which can give you a shock when you touch the doorknob after walking on a carpet, can also charge lightning through the friction of ice clusters within clouds; legend says that this phenomenon was demonstrated by Benjamin Franklin when he and his son flew a kite during a storm, observing that the kite’s wet string conducted sparks from the storm cloud to a key attached to its end.
Electrostatic effects arise throughout the insect world; they allow bees to attract pollen to them and help spiders spin negatively charged webs that attract and trap the positively charged bodies of their prey.
To test whether bees produce significant changes in the electric field in our atmosphere, the researchers placed an electric field monitor and camera near the site of several bee colonies. In the 3 minutes that the insects flooded the air, the researchers found that the potential gradient above the hives increased to 100 volts per meter. In other swarm events, scientists measured the effect as high as 1,000 volts per meter, making the charge density of a large bee swarm about six times greater than electrified dust storms and eight times greater than a storm cloud
The scientists also found that denser insect clouds meant larger electric fields, an observation that allowed them to model other swarming insects such as grasshoppers and butterflies.
The scientists said the locusts often swarm on “biblical scales,” creating thick clouds 460 square miles (1,191 square kilometers) in size and packing up to 80 million locusts into less than half a square mile (1.3 square kilometers). . The researchers’ model predicted that the swarming locusts’ effect on the atmospheric electric field was striking, generating electric charge densities similar to those produced by thunderstorms.
The researchers say it’s unlikely that the insects are producing thunderstorms, but even when the potential gradients don’t meet the conditions for making lightning, they can still have other effects on the climate. Electric fields in the atmosphere can ionize dust particles and pollutants, changing their movement in unpredictable ways. Because dust can scatter sunlight, knowing how it moves and where it settles is important to understanding a region’s climate.
“Interdisciplinarity is valuable here: Electric charge may seem to live solely in physics, but it’s important to know how much the whole natural world has of electricity in the atmosphere,” Hunting said. “Thinking more broadly, linking biology and physics could help with many puzzling problems, such as why large dust particles are found so far from the Sahara.”
#study #suggests #swarming #bees #potentially #change #weather
