ABOVE: SUSAN ELLIS, BUGWOOD.ORG
For several minutes in August 2017, a solar eclipse threw areas along a horizontal strip of North America into darkness. Now, researchers report that bees responded to this midday blackout by falling silent. The results, obtained by analyzing recordings from dozens of tiny microphones placed along the eclipse’s route, were published yesterday (October 10) in Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
“We anticipated, based on the smattering of reports in the literature, that bee activity would drop as light dimmed during the eclipse and would reach a minimum at totality,” study coauthor Candace Galen of the University of Missouri says in a statement. “But, we had not expected that the change would be so abrupt. . . . It was like ‘lights out’ at summer camp! That surprised us.”
The project was made possible through a collaborative effort of more than 400 scientists, members of ...
