Meet the tallest bee hives in the world 1:18
(CNN) --
Swarms of bees can generate as much electrical charge as a thunderstorm, according to a new study.
In a study published Monday in the academic journal
iScience
, researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom discovered this phenomenon by chance.
Biologist Ellard Hunting, the study's first author, told CNN that the Bristol team was studying how different organisms use the static electric fields around us.
Atmospheric electricity has various functions, mainly shaping meteorological phenomena and helping organisms, for example, to find food.
A swarm can occur when a hive is overcrowded.
Credit: Catalin Zestran/Adobe Stock
"For example, flowers have an electric field and bees can sense these fields. And these electric fields of flowers can change after receiving a visit from a bee, and other bees can use that information to know if a flower has been visited. Hunting explained.
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After setting up equipment to measure atmospheric electric fields at the university's field station, which has several bee hives, Hunting and his team found that whenever the bees swarmed, there was "a profound effect on the atmospheric electric fields", even though the weather had not changed.
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All insects create a charge during flight as a result of friction in the air, and the size of the charge varies by species.
Individual bees carry a small enough charge that the researchers overlooked it, so "this effect (in bee swarms) was a surprise," Hunting said.
The density of the bee swarm affects the size of the electrical charge.
Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
The researchers observed the hives at the field station, using a camera to record and electric field monitors to measure currents during bee swarms.
Swarms can occur when a hive is overcrowded, with the queen bee leaving with about 12,000 worker bees, the researchers wrote in the study.
The monitors measured currents for about three minutes at a time as the swarms passed overhead, picking up charges ranging from 100 to 1,000 volts per meter.
Hunting and his colleagues observed that the electric field was greater when the swarm was denser, that is, more densely populated with bees.
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They found that, depending on the density of the swarm, the atmospheric charge could be similar to that of a storm cloud, thunderstorm or electrified dust storm.
Using the model developed with bees, the team predicted the influence of other insect species, such as locusts, which form "biblical-scale" swarms, and theorized that they have the potential to change their local electrical environment with a "magnitude comparable to that of meteorological phenomena," says the study.
Hunting believes the team's findings open up new avenues of research, especially in the relationship between the natural world and atmospheric electricity.
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