Honeybee clusters seethe to keep cool as air temperatures rise

Jacob Peters and L. Mahadevan from Harvard University, with Orit Peleg from the University of Colorado sought to detail the precise changes that a swarm of honeybees makes as air temperatures rise and fall. It was known that, when unable to relocate to a place with a more habitable temperature, a cluster of honeybees will continually seethe and churn to maintain a stable temperature within. The researchers secured a box containing a queen bee to an inverted weighing scale and encouraged the colony to swarm around her, to find out how they adapted as the temperature rose and fell. Reconstructing time-lapse movies of the clusters, the team could see them become longer and broader as the temperature rose, almost doubling their volume at the highest temperature.

So, honeybees are able to regulate the temperature within a cluster by spreading apart as air temperatures rise, but they can only go so far before the swarm is in danger of disintegrating. Peters also warns that if environmental temperatures continue to rise, the forces within expanding clusters may be too great for resting swarms to withstand shattering as they attempt to avoid overheating.

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