Bees can electrify the air by as much as 1000 volts per meter, or more than a thunderstorm.
The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.
Static electricity emerges when the microscopic bumps and pits on two surfaces rub over each other, causing friction. This causes electrons, which are negatively charged, to jump from one surface to another, leaving one surface positively charged while the other surface becomes negatively charged. The transfer across the two ionized surfaces sets up a voltage difference, or potential gradient, across which the charges may leap.
Electrostatic effects emerge throughout the insect world; they enable bees to draw pollen to them, and help spiders spin negatively charged webs that attract and ensnare the positively charged bodies of their prey. Locusts often swarm to"biblical scales," the scientists said, creating thick clouds 460 square miles in size and packing up to 80 million locusts into less than half a square mile . The researchers’ model predicted that swarming locusts’ effect on the atmospheric electric field was staggering, generating densities of electric charge similar to those made by thunderstorms.
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