Unsolved phenomenon: A swarm of bees that were flying suddenly fell to the ground when the power went out

What strange things can happen after you turn off the room electricity? It wasn't the ghost emerging from under the bed or the black man's bright smile. Those are bees that fall to the ground. Last week, Twitter users were surprised to witness this strange phenomenon.

Shared by Hamish Symington, a plant pollinator at the University of Cambridge, the video of flying bees suddenly stopping and crashing to the ground has received more than 1.4 million views and more than 8,000 retweets.

Out of more than 1,000 comments, the common question everyone asks is why are the bees falling like that?

To be honest, Symington himself as a scientist does not have a definite answer to this phenomenon. Some fun theories have been put forward, for example bees run on solar energy, and the electricity goes out causing them to suddenly run out of energy.

Other imaginative people think there's a trick behind this "magic". Did the bees have metal attached and then Symington turned off the electricity at the same time as turning on the giant electromagnet below? Or the cage was sprayed with insecticide and the bees fell down to complete the promotional video?

Among those humorous theories, one Reddit user seems to have found a more serious answer. This guy says that bees have a "navigation lock" mechanism.

In the wild, when the weather changes suddenly such as a high wind or tornado, bees often use this emergency landing mechanism to fall to the ground as quickly as possible.

Because if they remain in the air, the wind can blow them away to an unknown location tens of kilometers away from the nest. Even bees that survived the storm could hardly find their way back.

"The navigation lock mechanism will help them fall to the ground, keeping their current position until the weather conditions improve, the cloud layer clears and the light shines clearly again," user Reddit said.

Bees in flight can suddenly roll over and fall to the ground.

This may also have to do with how bees use the position of the Sun to navigate back to the hive. Observations in the wild show that as soon as the sun goes down and the light disappears, the bees immediately stop moving.

However, it is also true that some tropical bees have adapted to the dark to fly and forage at night – a time when they are less competitive with other pollinators.

Whether bees can see in the dark depends on how we define "night" and "darkness"? While some animals are able to see at night because they have eyes adapted to low light, complete darkness is a different category, which describes a space completely devoid of light.

Another theory about the experiment Symington did is that bees were responding to predators. The disappearing light may represent the sudden appearance of a large predator's shadow. As a result, the bees used the emergency landing mechanism to find a way to hide under the forest canopy or the ground, where they were less visible than in the air.

Hamish Symington, a plant pollinator at the University of Cambridge.

But either way, the phenomenon of bees falling out of the air in the dark is worth investigating. Symington is raising bees to learn how they pollinate plants. "One of the funniest noises I know is the sound of a hundred bees falling from the sky when I turn off the lights in the bee room," he wrote.

And if you're surprised to discover bees that fly at night, or bees that fall out of the air when the power goes out, you should also know that some bees have now evolved to eat meat. It is true that in nature nothing is impossible.