Light Pollution May Be Keeping Honey Bees Up at Night - Yale E360

E360 Digest

November 12, 2024

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Light from cars, homes, and street lamps may be keeping bees up at night, according to a new study.

Honey bees prefer to sleep in the dark recesses of their hive, but on hot nights they will instead sleep outside. As the planet heats up, nights are warming faster than days, meaning honey bees could soon be spending more evenings outdoors, exposed to light pollution.

For the new study, researchers compared European honey bees sleeping in a darkened area to those sleeping under the continuous glow of artificial light. The lamp-lit bees slept less, and more fitfully, according to the study, published in Scientific Reports.

Authors suggest that, by robbing bees of sleep, light pollution could undermine the health of colonies. Honey bees communicate by dancing, and other research has shown that sleep-deprived bees dance with less precision. When bees perform their dance moves with greater ambiguity, they do a poorer job of pointing fellow bees in the direction of food.

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