> How much work in (mili)watts would be needed to ionize the beehive space that participates in the as easier to drying of honey? The movement of the beewings is not so demanding.

We likely don't have any data on how much static charge a bee can build up, but we do have data for humans, so we can compare.
Bees weigh 1/10th of a gram, a human weighs around 65 kg, so the best the bee can do would be 1/650,000th of the charge a human can hold.

It is better to work in Joules than watts, as Joules are energy, watts are just power. 

50V, 0.04 milli-Joules (mJ) - Minimum spark threshold, visible in a very dark room
4KV, 1.2 mJ - Average winter doorknob spark for average human
4KV, 1.2 mJ - Taking off a sweater, same spark, but you can get more than one for your money, 'cause you "recharge" with additional friction after each spark
100KV, half a Joule - The Van de Graaff generator at a science museum

Light a match, and the flame will ionize some air, but that's cheating as there's lots more energy in that process than in a static spark

But the bee is 1/650,000th the mass of the human, and this limits how charged it can become, so its never going to get anywhere near ionizing anything.  This is a good thing, as too much static build-up would mean that the bees would get "dirty wings" as dust would be attracted long before enough charge built up to ionize air.

To me, it looks like we are several orders of magnitude from where we’d need to be to do any ionizing with bee wing motion.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html