Tech

Thunder in Hive! Bees can generate electricity up to 1000 volts, camera shows


A new study published in the journal iScience explains that a swarm of honey bees can generate the same amount of electricity as a hurricane.

Can you believe that honey bees can help generate electricity? Right! A new study published in the journal iScience has suggested that honey bee colonies can generate as much electrical charge as a thunderstorm. Researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom figured this out.

Biologist Ellard Hunting, the study’s first author, told CNN that the Bristol team is working on different organisms using the static electric field available in the environment. Atmospheric electricity even affects weather events and help organisms in their functions such as foraging.

Explaining the study, Hunting said, “For example, flowers have electric fields and bees can sense these fields. And these electric fields of flowers can change when it is visited by a bee and the Other bees can use that information to see if a flower has been visited.”

The researchers set up equipment including several honeycombs to measure the atmospheric electric field at the university’s field station. Their research team found that a swarm of bees exerted a profound effect on the atmospheric electric field even when the weather remained unchanged.

As shared in the study, insects generate an electrical charge during flight due to friction in the air. However, the size of the charge varies between species. Since the charge of individual bees is quite small, it went unnoticed earlier and so “this effect (in swarms) came as a surprise,” says Hunting.

The researchers used a camera to record and an electric field monitor to measure electric currents in honey bee colonies. It happens when a hive is so overcrowded that the queen leaves with about 12,000 worker bees, one study noted.

The monitors tracked the currents for about three minutes each time the swarm passed through them, and the resulting charge ranged from 100 to 1000 volts per meter. The thicker the flock, the larger the electric field.

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