Bees and light

The technology can’t yet tell species apart based purely on buzz, but local observations suggested that most of the insects were honeybees or bumblebees. The results, which the schoolchildren helped analyze, showed that bees do in fact shut down in the darkness of the totality.

When bees are close to death, they often cling to flowers and look quite lethargic. When they do die, they then drop off the flowers , and you may find a number of these in your gardens, especially near the most bee-friendly plants.

What could be happening, is that the bees are cleaning their hive, throwing out the corpses of bees that died during the winter . This happens all year around, but can be more noticeable in spring then they literally have a spring clean after being confined by the cold for the winter.3 May 2011

It is easy to see these bees suddenly drop to the floor for no apparent reason except that the lights were turned off. There is no known cause for the bees to suddenly head for the ground, although some people speculate that bees may have become afraid of bats that hunt at night .