Bees Stop Flying During Total Solar Eclipses (smithsonianmag.com) 86
A new study published by the Entomological Society of America found that bees stop flying when the moon obstructs the sun during a total solar eclipse. "Using tiny microphones suspended among flowers, the team recorded the buzzing of the bees through all stages of the eclipse," reports Smithsonian Magazine. "The bees were active and noisy right up to the last moments before totality, the part of a total solar eclipse when the moon blocks all direct sunlight, and a night-like darkness settles over the land. As totality hit, the bees went totally silent in unison." From the report: The clear drop from buzzing to silence was the most striking change during the eclipse, but additional, smaller changes in the bees' buzzing could give the researchers clues about how the insects responded. As ecologist Candace Galen of the University of Missouri notes, the bees' buzzes lasted longer as it gradually got darker approaching totality. Increased buzz length suggests the bees started flying more slowly, they were taking longer flights, or some combination of both.
"The way I think about it is, if you're driving on a road and it gets foggy, you slow down," explains Galen. When there is less visibility, slowing down helps you process information and maintain situational awareness -- and like the bees did during totality, if there's absolutely zero visibility, you should probably pull over. Adjusting speed to acclimate one's senses to an environment that suddenly shifts is a common behavior in many animals, and it's been observed in bees when they fly before sunrise or sunset.
"The way I think about it is, if you're driving on a road and it gets foggy, you slow down," explains Galen. When there is less visibility, slowing down helps you process information and maintain situational awareness -- and like the bees did during totality, if there's absolutely zero visibility, you should probably pull over. Adjusting speed to acclimate one's senses to an environment that suddenly shifts is a common behavior in many animals, and it's been observed in bees when they fly before sunrise or sunset.
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Seriously... anyone who has ever experienced a solar eclipse know this is true-- animals act like it is becoming night, then they act like it is becoming morning.
“It was like someone turned out the lights and bees stopped flying,”
No fucking shit. That is exactly what happened.
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Seriously... anyone who has ever experienced a solar eclipse know this is true-- animals act like it is becoming night, then they act like it is becoming morning.
“It was like someone turned out the lights and bees stopped flying,”
No fucking shit. That is exactly what happened.
Chillaxe homie. There are probably a lot of people who spend so much tie looking at the eclipse they forget to look around them and see what else is happening.
Not just Bees (Score:4, Informative)
All wildlife doesn't seem to cope with a total solar eclipse. We saw some really strange things during the last one. Firstly there was dead silence. Birds stopped flying, they actually stopped making sound completely. Also kangaroos were freaked out. They congregated in a common area and huddled together. I've not seen anything quite like it.
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I have read claims that battles were won by people who knew an eclipse would occur and scare the enemies who did not know what's going on...though how reliable such accounts are is impossible to say..
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One could suggest humans behave in the same manner, perhaps for different reasons. Although some portions of the story are probably apocryphal, combat during the Battle of Halys [wikipedia.org] halted due to an eclipse. The result was the two opponents agreeing to a peace treaty.
Well, it makes sense when you realize that eclipses and comets were seen as acts of god(s). So if you are fighting and an eclipse happens a reasonable* assumption is that god is displeased with the fighting. Hell, Constantine seeing a sun dog is partially responsible for why Europe became Christian. It's amazing to see how people's interpretations of natural events has shaped world history.
*reasonable within the belief system
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Well, it makes sense when you realize that eclipses and comets were seen as acts of god(s). So if you are fighting and an eclipse happens a reasonable* assumption is that god is displeased with the fighting. Hell, Constantine seeing a sun dog is partially responsible for why Europe became Christian. It's amazing to see how people's interpretations of natural events has shaped world history.
*reasonable within the belief system
Also possible that the pause made them ask themselves "What the hell are we doing?"
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Well most animals have evolved around the Daily Earth rotation so it is light for on average 12 hours a day and dark for 12 hours a day, fluctuation based on latitude are gradual, so most species can adapt to it.
However Solar eclipses are rare occurrences and occur for such a short time, so animals who have a routine based on sunlight, will have their instincts confused. Because of its rarity and it in general harmlessness, there hasn't been much if any evolution in adapting to this, so there is a general
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All wildlife doesn't seem to cope with a total solar eclipse. We saw some really strange things during the last one. Firstly there was dead silence. Birds stopped flying, they actually stopped making sound completely. Also kangaroos were freaked out. They congregated in a common area and huddled together. I've not seen anything quite like it.
Its not terribly surprising, but it is definitely a cool phenomenon. One of the things I do during the leadup to an eclipse is check out the shadows from leaves and branches. You get multiple shadows. The light looks like regular daylight, but massively subdued. Regular light levels like that tend to be more orange colored.
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
Why people freaked out (Score:2)
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
Because they didn't happen often in their experience, they had no way to predict them, and they are pretty freaky. People tend to fear what they don't understand which you should know unless you've been living under a rock. There hasn't been a totality that passed over where I live in my lifetime and even the partials weren't generally notable. If you were living in an age where you didn't have access to libraries and internet and didn't get to travel much, chances are reasonable you'd kind of freak out
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I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
Because they didn't happen often in their experience, they had no way to predict them, and they are pretty freaky. People tend to fear what they don't understand which you should know unless you've been living under a rock.
My noggin runs differently. I'm super interested in what I don't understand. Besides, I'm afraid of rocks 8^)
Look how many people freaked out about the SpaceX launch this past week on the west coast and it wasn't hard to find out what was going on.
That's terribly sad, don't you think? But your point is well made.
Tough to explain (Score:2)
My noggin runs differently. I'm super interested in what I don't understand. Besides, I'm afraid of rocks 8^)
Umm, they didn't know it was a rock back then. Not for certain anyway. And an eclipse isn't a rock - it's an entire world traveling at terrifying speed going in front of and blocking the light on our world from a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion millions of kilometers away through the void of space. Good luck explaining what is actually happening to someone a thousand years ago without sounding like a lunatic. I appreciate your scientific fervor and world view but not everyone thinks like tha
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I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
You think too much as a modern human who knows the Earth is orbiting the Sun and when it's not there it's simply under the horizon and an eclipse is just the Moon intersecting. The sun god and rain god are cornerstones of all naturalistic religions, one was dependable and one was fickle. They prayed for the sun to rise again in the morning and for summer to follow winter but it always did, unlike droughts and other maladies the sun god always brought light, warmth and life. Remember a total eclipse is like
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I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
If you haven't read Nightfall (Isaac Asimov and Rober Silverberg), you should check it out.
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I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
If you haven't read Nightfall (Isaac Asimov and Rober Silverberg), you should check it out.
I'm afraid my fear gland is just not up to snuff, as several people relate.
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I know what you mean, I also made it to the last total eclipse [ecuadors.net] and all kangaroos must have been huddled together somewhere, cause we couldn't see any of them!
Ants too. (Score:2)
https://www.tapatalk.com/group... [tapatalk.com] for my short compilation from quick Google searches.
Of course (Score:2)
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Winnie, is that you?
how is the polarization of light during total ecl (Score:4, Interesting)
... as bees use polarized light for navigation that may be the key.....Read Randolf Menzel
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Bees see well intro the ultraviolet as well. During totality the bees are presented with several different stimuli that are out of place. The temperature drops suddenly, wind patterns change, light levels change both in the visible (to us) and UV. It does not get totally dark, however. The bees could fly if they desired. In my view, they are reacting to external stimuli in a normal way as they need to be able to find their hive after loosing important navigational information (the direction of the sun)
It's not just bees (Score:2)
My wife, her mother, and I drove an hour and a half to be right on the center line and get the full two and a half minutes. When the eclipse came, we quit moving and just stood there staring at the moon. Same with the 4 other people near us.
Maybe I can get some grant money to study this next time?
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My wife, her mother, and I drove an hour and a half to be right on the center line and get the full two and a half minutes. When the eclipse came, we quit moving and just stood there staring at the moon. Same with the 4 other people near us.
Maybe I can get some grant money to study this next time?
I'll give you tree fiddy!
Not surprising (Score:2)
I was in the path of totality last year. During the moments it was dark, bugs (cicadas or something) started making all their usual dusk noises, but just for that couple of minutes.
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I was in the path of totality last year. During the moments it was dark, bugs (cicadas or something) started making all their usual dusk noises, but just for that couple of minutes.
Katydids, I'll bet. But another cool thing.
Hmmm (Score:2)
A quick check finds that bees don't tend to fly at night (absent a variety of parasites that screw up their lives to the point of killing them).
Do night and solar eclipses have anything in common? Oh, yeah! It's dark then!
So perhaps the bees aren't flying because their tiny little bee-brains are looking out, seeing darkness, checking core programming, and stopping the whole flying thing till it's not so dark....
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So perhaps the bees aren't flying because their tiny little bee-brains are looking out, seeing darkness, checking core programming, and stopping the whole flying thing till it's not so dark....
And stopped buzzing as well. Basically an unexpected change in input. Interesting issues are what does this do to their internal clocks. Anyhow, it's pretty interesting to some of us, once you get past the basic concept of "It's dark, so it's night".
Saw the eclipse on a farm, interesting reactions (Score:3)
I saw the 2017 eclipse from my uncle's farm, and it was definitely worth the trouble (and the traffic afterwards) -- not ten minutes after it was over, we (other family gathered there) were already excited for 2024! Definitely an unearthly experience, and being on a farm, I got to see lots of animals reacting to the eclipse (as well as being awed myself, even though I knew it was coming -- I can only imagine how it must have felt to people who didn't know what was happening).
All the chickens ran into the coop, and when the eclipse was over, the rooster crowed.
All the gnats went to ground, which was very nice because I'd been swatting them all afternoon leading up to the eclipse (and would have been very cross if one had distracted me during totality).
My uncle had been worried that his goats might freak out, because they didn't like being left outside for too long after sunset, but they didn't seem concerned (maybe it was short enough that they didn't regard it as 'night time' the way the other critters did).
By far the funniest reaction was that of a neighboring farmer (as my aunt explained it to me), who was frantically asking for pairs of eclipse glasses for all of her animals -- "What if they look at the sun???" Fortunately, my aunt managed to explain to her that the animals would be okay -- us humans were the only critters dumb enough to look at the sun while it was out!