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Photo: Pixabay has no thunderstorms, which is better than thunderstorms.

Insects flying in the sky are electrified.

For example, when a bee flies through the air, its body will constantly rub against the molecules or particles around it. In the process, the electrons on the bees are easy to peel off. Electrons are negatively charged, and bees that lose some electrons have a weak positive charge.

This is the static electricity that we are familiar with. If you remember what was said in high school textbooks, glass rods rubbed with silk are positively charged and rubber rods rubbed with fur are negatively charged, all as a result of the transfer of electrons from one surface to another.

In addition to flying, insects have other ways to get static electricity: they can walk on a rugged surface, they can rub against another insect, and so on. Scientists are no stranger to this, but the amount of charge carried by an insect is usually very small, mostly in Picuron (10 ^-12 Coulomb) or Nacouren (10 ^-9 Coulomb), giving people the impression that it is difficult to become a climate.

Image source: the original paper, but recently, researchers from the University of Bristow in the UK have found that the impression once seemed a bit stereotyped. Studies have shown that a swarm of bees can carry more charge than a storm cloud in a thunderstorm. Maybe they really have the ability to change the weather?

How strong is the electric field to surpass the storm cloud? Scientists have known for about a century that not only bird feathers and mammalian hairs can store static electricity, but insects are also good at accumulating electric charges through friction.

The waxy layer of the outer epidermis of insects forms a large resistance between in vivo and in vitro. When the insect's body friction with other surfaces to produce static electricity, high resistance can effectively inhibit the flow of charge, so that the charge can accumulate.

These surface charges are also helpful to the daily life of insects. For example, to get nutrition, bees need to collect nectar and pollen, and flowers on sunny days are often negatively charged-when a bee lands on a flower, its positive charge attracts negatively charged pollen. At this point, the electric field near the flower changes and lasts for a period of time, reminding other bees that the flower has been eaten.

To ask how bees can monitor electric fields, researchers conducted experiments with bumblebees in 2016. They found that when a bumblebee flies within 10 centimeters of a flower, its hair bends due to an electric field. This bending activates some neurons under the hair so that bumblebees can sense electric fields and communicate signals with plants.

Photo Source: Pixabay, however, the communication scene is still gentle and calm, which seems to be a far cry from the big scene like "thunderstorm". Scientists at the University of Bristow in the UK have found an unexpected phenomenon at a field observation station:

There was no storm activity at the time, but electric field monitoring equipment showed a strange rise in atmospheric charge. At the same time, there is a swarm of Western bees (Apis mellifera) nearby, which means that the queen bee leads some workers to fly away from the original colony to find a new site to build a nest.

It needs to be explained here that what surprises scientists is the sudden increase in electric charge when dividing bees, and the activity of the colony itself is not accidental. The site has several beehives for research, and when the hive becomes overcrowded, it is prone to bee sharing (an average of about 12000 bees fly away). It is in this process that scientists want to monitor the changes in the electric field.

When dividing the bees, the bees gather on the branches for a few days. When the scout bees find a suitable location to build a nest, the colony will move there in a collective way. The researchers placed a camera nearby to record the migration of the colony, and an electric field monitor to record the intensity of the electric field, or potential gradient, during the migration.

Within three minutes, some of the bees in the colony flew over the monitoring equipment, during which the potential gradient increased by about 100 volts per meter (compared with when there was no colony migration). Moreover, the magnitude of the potential gradient is closely related to the colony density, and the larger the detection value of the potential gradient is, the denser the colony around the equipment is. The control group monitor set up 50 meters away from the colony did not find the same effect.

The black curve is the potential gradient within 3 minutes, and the green curve is the colony density (image source: original paper). In several other colony migrations, scientists also found an enhancement in the electric field. In the most violent one, the potential gradient increased by about 1000 volts per meter. Never before has such a large voltage been recorded in a colony.

The researchers also estimated the charge density of honeybee colonies during migration and compared the values with thunderstorm clouds and charged sandstorms in previous literature. It turns out that honeybee colonies can carry several times more charge per cubic meter than thunderstorm clouds and dotted sandstorms.

The outdated charge density of bees compared with thunderclouds and dotted sandstorms (photo source: original paper) scientists were surprised by the results. Although it may be a bit difficult for them to have an impact on a large area in terms of the scale of bee migration, the researchers think of desert locust swarms that are more spectacular than honeybees. When some locust plagues occur, billions of locusts fly over hundreds of square miles of land, and the researchers used the model to estimate that some of the locust plagues have an impact on atmospheric electric fields to the extent of thunderstorms.

When the electric field changes significantly, the density of aerosols and ions in the atmosphere will also change, thus affecting the formation of clouds. So, a group of insects may really have a chance to shape the weather through an electric field, which makes researchers excited to think about it. Perhaps they will slowly feel how powerful this ability to change the weather is in future research.

Want to use bees to generate electricity? Let's use plants. The potential difference (voltage) per meter is more than 1000 volts, which is probably a considerable figure for atmospheric electric fields. However, it may take about 50 billion bees to light an LED bulb with bees.

Rendering (source: Ellard Hunting) it seems that it may not be a very efficient way to generate electricity by rubbing a little electric charge by bees. But you may remember that plants that send signals to bees through electric fields can also carry charges themselves, and these charges can also be collected.

For example, a study published in 2018 suggested that plant leaves are well suited as a tool for contact / friction to convert mechanical energy into electricity. When the leaves touch or rub, there is an electric charge on the surface, which is then transported to all parts of the plant, just as it flows through a wire.

Another study published in the same year drew on this inspiration: scientists thought that since there is a "wire" in the plant, as long as the "plug" is connected to the stem of the plant, the electricity generated by the plant can be collected. The researchers found that contact with a whole leaf of Rhododendron with Ecoflex polymer produced a voltage of up to 140V. The 4.5cm square area of azaleas leaves per touch is enough to light up 100 green LED lights at the same time.

To observe the effect of plant discharge, getting it to turn on the LED is just one way. In addition, there is a special weather condition that allows plant discharge to be shown to human eyes in a more obvious way. Some researchers have observed that when lightning strikes across the sky, the leaf tips of some charged plants will appear blue sparks, which is very dazzling.

Photo Source: Penn State has a nice name for this phenomenon, called corona.

Original paper:

Https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)01513-9

Reference:

Https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.0528

Https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1230883

Https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/science/bees-locusts-electricity-charge.html

Https://www.newscientist.com/article/2343843-honeybee-swarms-generate-more-electricity-per-metre-than-a-storm-cloud/

Https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aenm.201703133

Https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201806689

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue), written by: chestnut, revision: clefable

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