This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Shayla Love.
这里是《科学美国人》的60 秒科学，我是谢拉·勒夫。
When you hear a bee buzzing along, visiting a flower, you’re hearing the movement of air made by the fluttering of its wings. But it turns out that bees are buzzing in more than one way.
当你听到一只蜜蜂嗡嗡地飞过一朵花时，听到的是它扇动翅膀所产生的空气运动。事实证明，蜜蜂嗡嗡叫的方式不止一种。
Giles I first saw this when I saw a bumblebee land on an electrode I was using, and I saw a real change in the measurement. And I thought, “This is a charged thing.”
我第一次看到这个是在一只大黄蜂落在我正在使用的电极上时，我发现测量发生了变化。我想，“这是个带电的东西。”
That’s Giles Harrison, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading in England. He’s co-author of a recent paper in iScience that measured the electric charge of swarms of bees and found that the insects can generate as much electricity as storm clouds.
这是贾尔斯·哈里森，英国雷丁大学大气物理学教授。他是最近在《iScience》上发表的一篇论文的合著者，该论文测量了蜂群的电荷，发现这些昆虫可以产生和雷雨云一样多的电力。
We’ve known for quite a long time already that bees carried an electric charge.
很长一段时间以来，我们已经知道蜜蜂携带电荷。
Ellard Hunting is a biologist at the University of Bristol in England, and he studies how different organisms use those electric fields in the environment. Plants and pollen tend to be negatively charged, and bees are positively charged.
埃拉德·亨特是英国布里斯托尔大学的生物学家，他研究不同生物如何利用环境中的电场。植物和花粉往往带负电荷，而蜜蜂则带正电荷。
The bee visits a flower, and the pollen is actually electrostatically attracted to the bee, and so they stick better and they transfer better.
蜜蜂拜访一朵花，花粉实际上被静电吸到蜜蜂身上，所以它们更容易粘在一起，也更容易转移。
There are several honeybee hives that are used for research at the field station at the University of Bristol’s school of veterinary sciences. Those bees sometimes swarm, and that’s when the researchers were able to directly measure them using an electric field monitor.
在布里斯托尔大学兽医科学学院的野外研究站，有几个蜂箱被用于研究。这些蜜蜂有时会成群结队，这时研究人员就可以使用电场监测器直接测量它们。
Bees can also electrically sense whether a flower has been visited by another bee who already took its nectar. But until now, it hadn’t been considered that living things flying around in the atmosphere could make an impact with their own charges.
蜜蜂还能通过电流感知一朵花是否被另一只蜜蜂光顾过。但直到现在，人们还没有考虑过这种生物可以用它们自己的电荷产生影响。
Now, an individual bee’s charge is minuscule: it takes a lot of bees to generate enough electricity to make an impact.
现在，一只蜜蜂的电量非常小，我们需要很多蜜蜂才能产生足够的电力来产生影响。
Imagine that you need a billion of those to light up an LED.
想象一下，你需要十亿个这样的东西来点亮一个LED。
Fifty million million bees to get enough charge to start a car.
五千亿只蜜蜂能获得足够的电量发动一辆汽车。
But altogether, because there are so many insects in the atmosphere, they can have a massive effect.
但总的来说，因为大气中有非常多的昆虫，它们足以产生巨大的影响。
This means that bees and other large groups of insects are capable of changing the atmospheric electric fields around them—potentially impacting things such as weather events, cloud formation and dust dispersal.
这意味着蜜蜂和其他大型昆虫群体能够改变它们周围的大气电场——潜在地影响诸如天气事件、云层形成和灰尘传播等事情。
Insects are not the only living thing that spends time in the atmosphere. Birds and microorganisms carry charge, too, and take up space in the lower atmosphere.
昆虫并不是唯一在大气中生活的生物。鸟类和微生物也携带电荷，并在低层大气中占据空间。
Even before the bees were measured, we knew the sky was filled with electricity. These static electric fields are found everywhere in Earth’s atmosphere. And they can be swayed by rain, lighting, aerosols, pollution, volcanoes and possibly earthquakes.
甚至在蜜蜂被测量电荷之前，我们就知道空气中充满了电。这些静电场在地球大气层中随处可见。它们可能会受到降雨、光照、气溶胶、污染、火山甚至地震的影响。
Atmospheric electricity is measured as something called the vertical potential gradient, or PG, which is the difference in voltage between the surface of Earth and any point in the air. The team found the swarms of bees could change the PG by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter.
大气电势是用垂直势梯度(PG)来测量的，即地球表面与空气中任何一点之间的电压差。研究小组发现，蜂群可以使PG电压改变100～1000伏/米。
They also modeled how atmospheric electricity might be impacted by other insects, such as desert locusts, which can form swarms of up to 460 square miles. These swarms are dense enough to cram 40 million to 80 million of the insects into less than half a square mile. Based on past measurements of locusts’ electric charges, such swarms create more charge than those reported for electrical storms.
他们还模拟了大气电流如何受到其他昆虫的影响，比如沙漠蝗虫，它们可以形成多达460平方英里的群体。这种密度相当于将4000万到8000万只昆虫塞进不到半平方英里的空间。根据过去对蝗虫电荷的测量，这种蝗群产生的电荷比报告的暴风雨产生的电荷更多。
Not all insects pack such an electrical punch. In the modeling, moths and butterflies don’t seem to have a big impact because of their low densities.
并不是所有的昆虫都有这样的电冲击力。在建模中，飞蛾和蝴蝶似乎没有太大的影响，因为它们的密度很低。
Right now insects’ electric charges aren't accounted for in climate models that look at complex interactions in the atmosphere. They probably should be: the combined electric charge of all these insects might impact the development of rain, snow, and droplet formation and maybe even how clouds are made.
目前，昆虫的电荷在气候模型中还没有被考虑在内，这些模型主要用于研究大气中复杂的相互作用。它们可能应该是:所有这些昆虫的电荷总和可能会影响雨、雪和液滴的形成，甚至可能影响云的形成。
We can only speculate, but, like, that might have an impact on cloud formation. If there’s a direct link between insects and cloud formation, then we know that clouds are relevant to climate.
我们只能推测，但是，这可能会对云的形成产生影响。如果昆虫和云的形成有直接联系，那么我们就知道云与气候有关。
Insect electricity could also be influencing how dust moves around the atmosphere. This is something that atmospheric scientists are interested in because such dust cuts off incoming sunlight and can change temperature distributions locally.
昆虫发出的电流也可能影响尘埃在大气中的移动。这是大气科学家感兴趣的东西，因为这样的尘埃阻隔了入射的阳光，可以改变局部的温度分布。
The link between dust and insects is very interesting because one of the questions in climate change is “How is it that large particles move from the Sahara?” And we just thought about it in terms of the physics of transporting them from the Sahara. What if they’re stuck to a locust because they’re charged? That really changes things, and we could think about it very differently.
灰尘和昆虫之间的联系非常有趣，因为气候变化的一个问题是“大颗粒是如何从撒哈拉沙漠移动的?”我们只是从物理角度考虑从撒哈拉沙漠运输它们。如果它们因为带电而粘在蝗虫上怎么办?这真的改变了事情，我们可以用不同的方式来思考。
After learning about how much of a spark these insects can generate together, it may be time to start taking into account all that extra buzzing up in the air.
在了解了这些昆虫在一起能产生多少火花之后，也许是时候开始考虑空气中那些额外的嗡嗡声了。
For 60-Second Science, this is Shayla Love.
60秒科学，谢拉·勒夫报道。
This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Shayla Love.
When you hear a bee buzzing along, visiting a flower, you’re hearing the movement of air made by the fluttering of its wings. But it turns out that bees are buzzing in more than one way.
Giles I first saw this when I saw a bumblebee land on an electrode I was using, and I saw a real change in the measurement. And I thought, “This is a charged thing.”
That’s Giles Harrison, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading in England. He’s co-author of a recent paper in iScience that measured the electric charge of swarms of bees and found that the insects can generate as much electricity as storm clouds.
We’ve known for quite a long time already that bees carried an electric charge.
Ellard Hunting is a biologist at the University of Bristol in England, and he studies how different organisms use those electric fields in the environment. Plants and pollen tend to be negatively charged, and bees are positively charged.
The bee visits a flower, and the pollen is actually electrostatically attracted to the bee, and so they stick better and they transfer better.
There are several honeybee hives that are used for research at the field station at the University of Bristol’s school of veterinary sciences. Those bees sometimes swarm, and that’s when the researchers were able to directly measure them using an electric field monitor.
Bees can also electrically sense whether a flower has been visited by another bee who already took its nectar. But until now, it hadn’t been considered that living things flying around in the atmosphere could make an impact with their own charges.
Now, an individual bee’s charge is minuscule: it takes a lot of bees to generate enough electricity to make an impact.
Imagine that you need a billion of those to light up an LED.
Fifty million million bees to get enough charge to start a car.
But altogether, because there are so many insects in the atmosphere, they can have a massive effect.
This means that bees and other large groups of insects are capable of changing the atmospheric electric fields around them—potentially impacting things such as weather events, cloud formation and dust dispersal.
Insects are not the only living thing that spends time in the atmosphere. Birds and microorganisms carry charge, too, and take up space in the lower atmosphere.
Even before the bees were measured, we knew the sky was filled with electricity. These static electric fields are found everywhere in Earth’s atmosphere. And they can be swayed by rain, lighting, aerosols, pollution, volcanoes and possibly earthquakes.
Atmospheric electricity is measured as something called the vertical potential gradient, or PG, which is the difference in voltage between the surface of Earth and any point in the air. The team found the swarms of bees could change the PG by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter.
They also modeled how atmospheric electricity might be impacted by other insects, such as desert locusts, which can form swarms of up to 460 square miles. These swarms are dense enough to cram 40 million to 80 million of the insects into less than half a square mile. Based on past measurements of locusts’ electric charges, such swarms create more charge than those reported for electrical storms.
Not all insects pack such an electrical punch. In the modeling, moths and butterflies don’t seem to have a big impact because of their low densities.
Right now insects’ electric charges aren't accounted for in climate models that look at complex interactions in the atmosphere. They probably should be: the combined electric charge of all these insects might impact the development of rain, snow, and droplet formation and maybe even how clouds are made.
We can only speculate, but, like, that might have an impact on cloud formation. If there’s a direct link between insects and cloud formation, then we know that clouds are relevant to climate.
Insect electricity could also be influencing how dust moves around the atmosphere. This is something that atmospheric scientists are interested in because such dust cuts off incoming sunlight and can change temperature distributions locally.
The link between dust and insects is very interesting because one of the questions in climate change is “How is it that large particles move from the Sahara?” And we just thought about it in terms of the physics of transporting them from the Sahara. What if they’re stuck to a locust because they’re charged? That really changes things, and we could think about it very differently.
After learning about how much of a spark these insects can generate together, it may be time to start taking into account all that extra buzzing up in the air.
For 60-Second Science, this is Shayla Love.
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