蜂群携带的电荷居然比雷暴云还强(上)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Shayla Love.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是谢拉·洛夫。

When you hear a bee buzzing along, visiting a flower, you’re hearing the movement of air made by the fluttering of its wings.

当你听到一只蜜蜂发出嗡嗡声并降落到一朵花上时，你听到的其实是蜜蜂扇动翅膀导致空气震动而发出的声音。

But it turns out that bees are buzzing in more than one way.

但研究表明，蜜蜂产生嗡嗡声的原因不止一种。

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.

我初次发现这的时候，是我看到一只大黄蜂落到我正在用的一个电极上，测量值发生了变化。

And I thought, “This is a charged thing.”

我想，“这是一个带电的东西。”

That’s Giles Harrison, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading in England.

贾尔斯·哈里森是英国雷丁大学的大气物理学教授。

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.

最近发表在《交叉科学》期刊上的一篇文章测量了蜂群的电荷量，并发现这些蜜蜂可以产生与雷暴云一样多的电。而哈里森就是这篇文章的合作者之一。

We’ve known for quite a long time already that bees carried an electric charge.

我们很早就了解到蜜蜂携带电荷。

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.

埃拉德·亨特是英国布里斯托尔大学的一名生物学家，他研究不同生物如何利用环境中的电场。

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

植物和花粉通常带负电荷，而蜜蜂通常带正电荷。

The bee visits a flower, and the pollen is actually electrostatically attracted to the bee.

当一只蜜蜂在一只花上降落，它的花粉实际上是通过静电吸引蜜蜂飞来的。

There are several honeybee hives that are used for research at the field station at the University of Bristol’s school of veterinary sciences.

在布里斯托尔大学兽医科学学院的野外研究站，有几个用于研究的蜂箱。

Those bees sometimes swarm, and that’s when the researchers were able to directly measure them using an electric field monitor.

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对它们进行测量。

Bees can also electrically sense whether a flower has been visited by another bee who already took its nectar.

蜜蜂还可以通过电的变化识别一朵花是否被另一只已经采了花蜜的蜜蜂采过。

But until now, it hadn’t been considered that living things flying around in the atmosphere could make an impact with their own charges.

但到目前为止，人们还没有想过在大气中四处飞行的动物可以利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.

一只蜜蜂携带的电荷是极小的: 需要许多只蜜蜂才能产生足够的电力，才能产生影响。

Imagine that you required a billion of those to light up an LED.

想象一下，需要十亿只蜜蜂才能点亮一个LED灯。

But altogether, because there are so many insects in the atmosphere, they can have a massive effect.

总的来说，由于大气中存在大量的昆虫，它们可以产生巨大的影响。

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.

这意味着成群的蜜蜂与昆虫能够改变它们周围的大气电场--潜在影响着极端天气事件、云层形成、粉尘扩散等。

Insects are not the only living thing that spends time in the atmosphere.

昆虫并不是唯一生活在大气层中的生物。

Birds and microorganisms carry charge, too, and take up space in the lower atmosphere.

鸟儿和微生物也携带电荷，占据着低层大气的空间。