What behaviors in bees change just before, during and after a solar eclipse?
I've heard from a friend that some bees exhibit behavioral changes during a solar eclipse event. I'd like to know what the changes are.
Apparently there's a cycle that starts as the eclipse begins, enters a different phase during the eclipse and another phase as the eclipse wanes. When the whole event is over, they go back to normal behavior.
Is this true? If so, what are the actual behavioral changes at each phase? Does the species matter?
Ideally, I'm looking for information from reliable scientific sources, but trustworthy anecdotal evidence is acceptable too.
To keep the question from being too broad, I'm limiting it to North America. However, if the same behavioral changes are evident in other parts of the world, answers about those are fine with me, and I can remove the limitation.
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1 answer
There was a study that found that during totality, the bees stopped buzzing suddenly without any gradual slowdown.
The researchers found that while the insects were happily buzzing throughout the day and during the partial phases of the eclipse, the bees went quiet the instant that the total eclipse occurred in their location. Of the 16 monitoring locations the group set up in Oregon, Idaho and Missouri, they identified only a single buzz during totality, compared with a symphony of droning sounds most other times of the day.
“We expected there would be a gradual decrease in the number of buzzes as it got darker and darker, but we didn’t see that,” 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. “At totality, they just stopped. It was very surprising.”
The Moon Eclipsed the Sun. Then the Bees Stopped Buzzing.
Also, see
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/what-bees-did-during-great-american-eclipse
https://earthsky.org/earth/bees-stopped-buzzing-during-aug2017-total-solar-eclipse
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