Last year’s Great American Eclipse drew hundreds of millions of eyes to the sky. But while people across the country “oohed” and “aahed” at the phenomenon, it appears the bees went silent.

So found a new study that monitored the acoustic activity of bees before, during and after totality — the moment when the moon completely blocked the sun — during the solar eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017. Researchers at the University of Missouri, along with a small army of elementary school children and other volunteers, collected audio recordings of honeybees, bumblebees and other types of bees as they visited flowers along the path of totality.

The researchers found that while the insects were happily buzzing throughout the day and during the partial phases of the eclipse, the bees went quiet the instant that the total eclipse occurred in their location. Of the 16 monitoring locations the group set up in Oregon, Idaho and Missouri, they identified only a single buzz during totality, compared with a symphony of droning sounds most other times of the day.

“We expected there would be a gradual decrease in the number of buzzes as it got darker and darker, but we didn’t see that,” said Candace Galen, a biologist at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study, which appeared Wednesday in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. “At totality, they just stopped. It was very surprising.”