BEEclipse: Honey bee behavior in light of a total solar eclipse

ABSTRACT
A total solar eclipse cast an ephemeral darkness across a slice of North America on 8 April 2024. A sporadic history of monitoring nonhuman animals during this cosmic rarity has revealed abnormal behavioral responses, including activity changes in honey bees (Apis mellifera). In anticipation of last year’s event, we set up observation hives in Ohio and Indiana and collaborated with beekeepers across the contiguous USA to assess how honey bee behavior changes at the entrance of a hive and, for the first time, inside hives. We equipped 154 hives in 12 states positioned along the path of the totality with “BeeDar” equipment (BroodMinder.com) to monitor entrance activity, and manually transcribed videos of entrance activity in 3 additional hives. We videotaped 6 “dance floors” (where honey bees perform the “waggle dance,” which encodes the direction and distance to an advertised site) in 4 hives to directly assess waggle dance activity, directional precision of dances, and dance follower responses – before, during, and after the peak eclipse.

Flight activity at the hive entrance spiked just prior to the time of totality, then plummeted immediately after. As expected, this change in entrance-exit activity occurred only on the day of the eclipse. Looking inside hives, we will use semi-automated means of quantifying changes in overall activity across the colony. We will also quantify dance activity, precision, and follower response to see if this celestial anomaly compromises, albeit briefly, the most famous example of invertebrate communication.