Bill Anderson on how solar storms cause foraging honeybees to ‘forget’ their way back to the hive. Plus: Join our Idle Beekeeping Day (see below)

As those of us in the northern hemisphere slowly tilt our spin southwards towards the lengthening days of the summer solstice, crops grow, flowers bloom and the sun lifts our spirits simply by shining more. While we might be inclined to strip off and bathe in sunlight, for honeybees now’s the time to get really busy: harvesting the maximum floral bounty and storing it to honey them through the coming winter.

But all the flowers in the world are no good to bees if they can’t find them, and the food those flowers freely offer is of little use if the bees can’t find their way back to the hive with it to feed their young.

Like all of us, bees use local landmarks and memory to navigate in their immediate neighbourhood. And like ancient mariners using sextants and clocks to determine their position at sea, when bees travel further from their hive they use three fixed eyes on the backs of their heads to triangulate the position of the sun, and an internal clock set to Hive Mean Time which allows them to precisely calculate longitude and latitude.

But there’s a much simpler piece of essential kit that underpins both human and bee navigation: a magnetic compass. Latitude and longitude can pinpoint your exact position on the planet, but without a compass it’s much more difficult to quickly and accurately know where you’re going: bees can internally detect and interpret the earth’s magnetic fields.

Because magnetic compasses work even when it’s dark, it would be easy to assume they operate independently of the sun and most of the time this is true. But there are occasions when our life-giving sun combines a visible solar flare with an invisible coronal mass ejection. If this CME happens to be pointing straight at us on earth we’re in the firing line for hundreds of million of tonnes of solar energetic particles travelling at many millions of miles per hour. Our sun hasn’t turned into the Death Star, but when a CME hits us the disruption to the earth’s magnetic field is so substantial that not only navigation satellites but also high voltage power lines can be rendered inoperable. The Swedish city of Malmo was blacked out by a CME in 2003 and Britain had a massive near miss just before the Olympics in 2012. The National Grid constantly monitors the sun so they can take action to limit terminal damage to essential power transformers – but although a CME can take 15 hours to reach us from the sun, it’s only in the last 15 minutes of its journey that scientists can predict the extent of its effects.

Fortunately cable-frying solar emissions occur rarely, but although the smaller, more frequent solar storms don’t trouble us much, it appears they can seriously affect creatures with internal compasses. Whales get stranded on beaches four times more often immediately after solar storms, and honeybees are nearly three times more likely to fail to return to the hive during these severe disturbances in the earth’s geomagnetic field. As Professor Jürgen Tautz writes in his paper Severe Honey Bee Losses Correlate With Geomagnetic And Proton Disturbances In Earth’s Atmosphere: “The bee losses are consistent with the sudden loss of bees observed in the past 100 years by beekeepers and recently renamed colony collapse disorder.” Correlation is not causation – so pesticides, intensive agriculture, loss of habitat and industrial beekeeping practices are by no means off the hook as major contributory factors – but this mysterious, catastrophic “evaporation of bees” is a historic phenomenon that predates all of them, and if it is indeed due to intense solar activity, then there’s very little we can do to help bees or whales affected by it. When such creatures great and small consult their magnetic guidance systems during a solar storm it would be the equivalent of a mariner watching the needle of his normally reliable compass constantly spinning. A foraging bee flying out towards a known source of food might never find it, and never find their way home.

But while the bees have successfully survived such cosmic onslaughts for 15 million years without our help, in recent times, since Edison and Marconi, we’ve become increasingly enthusiastic generators of electromagnetic disturbance and although the effects on bees may be subtler, they are significant and there are things an idle beekeeper can do to mitigate them. A recent study* measured the effects of increasingly powerful electromagnetic fields on bees to see if they significantly affected six of their basic behaviours inside the hive: walking, grooming, wings moving, contact between individuals, flying, and stillness were all compared with a control group which was left undisturbed. Almost all six behaviours were detrimentally affected and some not so subtly: reduced grooming not only measurably deprived the hive of small amounts of nutritious pollen grains cleaned off the body hairs of bees returning from flowers, but much more importantly it also inhibited removal of the deadly parasitic varroa mite – a potential bee colony killer.

The one unaffected behaviour was stillness – the only solitary act. All the other behaviours are social and this suggests there’s an element of social communication between bees that is electromagnetic, like radio transmissions, and it’s this that was being disrupted by the distracting “noise”. Bees aren’t just aerial insects, they’re aerials.

In analogue days, listening to Verdi on the radio at home could be interrupted by a passing minicab driver loudly announcing from your speaker that he’d successfully picked up his fare, and the voice of his controller acknowledging his transmission. Sometimes they’d have a chat in your living room if the taxi driver got stuck in traffic. You were at the mercy of “Roger” ruining your Rigoletto. But it was possible to protect your reception from unwanted signals by simply wrapping your aerial connection with a metallic layer – such ubiquitous “coaxial” cable is still what we use to clearly connect our TVs to their aerials.

I’ve started incorporating a layer of metallic fabric to the woollen insulation permanently wrapped around my hives. Not only will this help to usefully reflect heat, but because it’s specifically woven to block electromagnetic frequencies, the bees won’t be bamboozled by our broadcasting – from now on if my bees want to tune into Verdi they’ll have to listen al fresco.

This article is from Idler #78.

Join us for the Idle Beekeeping Day, Saturday 23 May 2026, a chance to meet, learn and share ideas with both skilled beekeepers and new beekeepers in a bucolic corner of the Wiltshire countryside. Or treat a friend to this special day out. Click here for details.

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