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The Great American Eclipse of last year has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the skies. But while people across the country have "oohed" and "aahed" in the face of the phenomenon, it seems that the bees have been silent.
So found a new study that monitored the acoustic activity of bees before, during and after all – the moment when the moon completely blocked the sun – during the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. Researchers from the University of Missouri, accompanied by a small army of schoolchildren and other volunteers collected audio recordings of honey bees, bumblebees and other types of bees while they visited flowers along the path of totality.
The researchers found that while the insects buzzed happily throughout the day and during the partial phases of the eclipse, the bees were dead from the moment the total eclipse it was produced at their location. Of the 16 surveillance sites that the group has set up in Oregon, Idaho and Missouri, they have identified only one buzz during the whole, compared to a symphony of buzzing sounds almost every other moments of the day.
"We were expecting a gradual decrease in the number of buzzes as the weather got darker, but we did not see it," said Candace Galen, a biologist at the University of Missouri. and lead author of the study, which appeared Wednesday in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. "All in all, they just stopped. It was very surprising. "
According to information from the public, the bees returned to their hives during the The total solar eclipse of 1932, which swept across Canada and parts of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, has not been the subject of extensive scientific study of the behavior of bees like this one, according to the authors.
To spy on insects, Dr. Galen and her volunteers installed USB-sized microphones, called "USBees", in bouquets of flowers and gardens as far away from the crowd as possible. the circulation. They also placed environmental sensors that recorded temperature and brightness.
After the eclipse, scientists and schoolchildren evaluated the data. This meant listening to three-minute audio clips drawn from random dots before and after the whole, as well as a three-minute clip taken during the whole. The total length of the test sites ranged from about 40 seconds in Oregon to about two minutes and thirty seconds in Missouri.
"Counting the buzzes of bees was a class effort. We all had to listen and write down what everyone had heard, "said Marci Fitzpatrick, a teacher at Shepard Boulevard Elementary School in Columbia, Missouri, whose fifth-grade class participated in the study. "They have become quite the little bee analysts."
"We scientists have more sophisticated ways to say the same thing, but the kids were pretty much right," said Dr. Galen. "It was a pretty humbling experience for someone with a doctorate and 30 years of research experience to get the kids right from the start. "
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