What strange phenomenon can occur after you turn off the lights in a room? It’s not a ghost crawling out from under the bed or the bright smile of a man of color. It’s the sound of bees dropping to the ground. Last week, social media users on Twitter were astonished to witness this bizarre occurrence.
Shared by Hamish Symington, a pollination researcher at the University of Cambridge, the video showing bees flying suddenly halting and plummeting to the ground has garnered over 1.4 million views and more than 8,000 retweets.
Among the over 1,000 comments, the common question posed by everyone was: why are the bees falling like that?
To be honest, Symington himself, as a scientist, does not have a definitive answer for this phenomenon. Some amusing theories have been suggested, such as the bees being solar-powered, and the power outage suddenly draining their energy.
Others with vivid imaginations wonder if there is some trick behind this “magic.” Could the bees be attached to metal, and did Symington turn off the power while simultaneously activating a giant electromagnet underneath? Or was the enclosure sprayed with insecticide, causing the bees to fall to complete a promotional video?
Amid these humorous hypotheses, a Reddit user seems to have found a more serious answer. This individual mentioned that the bees have a “navigation lock mechanism.”
In nature, when the weather changes abruptly, such as during a strong wind or tornado, bees often use this emergency landing mechanism to drop to the ground as quickly as possible.
Because if they remain airborne, the wind could carry them to an unknown location, potentially dozens of kilometers away from their hive. Even if the bees survive the storm, they would struggle to find their way back.
“The navigation lock mechanism helps them drop to the ground, maintaining their current position until weather conditions improve, the fog clears, and light shines back clearly,” the Reddit user explained.
Bees flying can suddenly drop to the ground.
This could also relate to how bees use the position of the sun to navigate back to their hive. Observations in nature show that immediately after sunset and the light disappears, bees stop moving.
However, it is also evident that some tropical bee species have adapted to fly and forage at night – a time when they face less competition from other pollinators.
Whether bees can see in the dark depends on how we define “night” and “darkness.” While some animal species can see at night due to their eyes being adapted for low light, total darkness represents a different concept, describing a space completely devoid of light.
Another hypothesis regarding Symington’s experiment is that the bees are reacting to a predator. The disappearance of light could symbolize the sudden appearance of a large predator’s shadow. Consequently, the bees might have used their emergency landing mechanism to seek refuge under the forest canopy or on the ground, where they are less exposed compared to being in the air.
Hamish Symington, pollination researcher at the University of Cambridge.
Regardless, the phenomenon of bees falling from the sky in the dark is certainly worth studying. Symington is raising bees to understand their pollination processes for plants. He writes: “One of the funniest sounds I know is the sound of a hundred bees falling from the sky when I turn off the lights in the beehive room.”
And if you are surprised by the discovery of night-flying bees or bees dropping from the sky when the power goes out, you should also know that some bee species have now evolved to become carnivorous. Indeed, in nature, nothing is impossible.
