Bees Get A Buzz In The Darkness

By Michael Sheather
on 8 September 2024

It’s long been known that bees are the essential workers of the natural world, but a new study has revealed for the first time that some species of bees even work the night shift.

Pollinating plants is not just an essential service for the world’s bees, it’s also a full-time job. And as hard working and dedicated as our bee populations are, up until now scientists believed that they did their creative, life-generating work during the daytime.

But a study from Down Under has revealed for the first time that not all bees are created equal. Two species of Australian bees have adapted an extraordinary superpower that enables them to collect nectar and spread plant pollans at night.

The astonishing revelation has come to light in a study by a team of ecological researchers from the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University in South Australia.

Masked bee species (Meroglossa gemmata) with night foraging activity in Australia CREDIT JAMES DOREY, FLINDERS UNIVERSITY
Masked bee species (Meroglossa gemmata) with night foraging activity in Australia CREDIT JAMES DOREY, FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

According to Jürgen Tautz in his book The Buzz About Bees, foraging bees tend to sleep at night inside their hives and only usually work during daylight hours. Traditionally it has been assumed this is because low temperatures tend to minimise bee activity.

But this study flies in the face of that assertion. The researchers has for the first time observed night-time foraging behaviour by a nomiine (Reepenia bituberculata) and masked (Meroglossa gemmata) bee species.

Both species have developed enlarged compound and simple eyes which allow them to gather more light when compared to their daylight-active relatives.

Published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, the study authors explain that this improved low-light ability could potentially also exist in other, so far unidentified Australian species that are also secretly active at night.

Lead author PhD Candidate James Dorey, from Flinders University, the two Australian bee species active at night and during twilight hours are mostly found in Australia’s tropical north, but potentially there could be more adaptive species scattered across arid, subtropical and perhaps even temperate environments right across the Australian mainland.

“We have confirmed the existence of at least two crepuscular bee species in Australia and there are likely to be many more that can forage both during the day and into the early morning or evening under low light conditions James Dorey says.

“It’s true that bees aren’t generally known to be very capable when it comes to using their eyes at night, but it turns out that low-light foraging is more common than currently thought.

“Before this study, the only way to show that a bee had adapted to low-light was by using difficult-to-obtain behavioural observations, but we have found that you should be able to figure this out by using high-quality images of a specific bee.”

Nectar of the night

Bees that forage during dim-light conditions aren’t studied enough, James says, pointing to the fact that there are no reliable, previously published records for any Australian species.

“Our study provides a framework to help identify low-light-adapted bees and the data that is needed to determine the behavioural traits of other species,” James says. “This is important as we need to increase efforts to collect bee species outside of normal hours and publish new observations to better understand the role that they play in maintaining ecosystems.”

The researchers outline why more needs to be understood about the behaviour of bee species to help protect them from the potential impacts of climate change.

“Global weather patterns are changing and temperatures in many parts of Australia are rising along with the risk of prolonged droughts and fires. So, we have to improve our understanding about insects pollinating at night or in milder parts of the day to avoid potential extinction risks or to mitigate loss of pollination services.”

“This also means we have to highlight the species that operate in a narrow window of time and could be sensitive to climatic changes, so conservation becomes an important concern. Because quite frankly, we have ignored these species up until now.”

FUN Bee Facts

  1. Bees have no eyelids.
  2. There are 25,000 different species of bees.
  3. Male bees do not sting. This is because instead of a stinger, a male bee has an endophallus, a penis-like instrument for injecting sperm. 
  4. It takes 12,000 bee just a few hours to turn 5 kgs of nectar into a 1.5kg jar of honey.
  5. One in three mouthfuls of food consumed by the average person eats has been pollinated by bees, including most fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, herbs, spices and oil crops. 

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