This is Scientific American 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.

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 know for quite a long time already that the bees carry an electric charge.

Eleard 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 in pollen tend to be negatively charged, and bees are positively charged.

The bees visit the flower, and then the pollen are actually electrostatically attracted to the bee,

and so they stay better in the transfer better.

There are several honeybee hives that are used for research at the field station

at the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Sciences.

Those bees sometimes swarm, and that's when the researchers were able to directly measure from 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 had been considered that living things flying around in the atmosphere

could make an impact with their own charges.

Now, an individual bee charges minuscule.

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