![]() ![]() “The first thing we noticed was that drones seemed to switch between two distinctive modes of flight,” says Woodgate. The researchers’ diligence paid off, and they made some surprising discoveries. James Makinson, one of the study’s coauthors, tweets that he “used to live in the back of a radar van,” to help make sure they didn’t lose the drone’s signal. The receiver station has what look like large satellite dishes attached to a rotating turret, which pick up the drone’s signal as it flies around, exploring the outside world. When a drone equipped with a transponder exits its hive, the researchers can detect the harmonic signal using a large radar receiver parked out in the field. With harmonic radar, though, the radio wave doesn’t exactly bounce: The special transponder attached to the bee absorbs the signal, then emits another one at a higher frequency (a harmonic signal), making it easier to detect in an otherwise noisy landscape. However, honey bees are too small, and their environment too complex, for this technique to enable tracking of individual bees. Regular radar technology works a lot like sonar, but uses beams of radio waves instead of sound. To avoid this problem, he and his colleagues glued small radar transponders, which resemble sewing pins, to the drones’ backs, enabling the researchers to track the drones’ flights and see if congregation areas really exist. Woodgate explains that since drones will return to a location at which they have smelled a queen, scientists might even have unwittingly created the congregation areas they were studying. “The vast majority of evidence for congregation areas comes from people using caged queens or queen pheromone lures, which they raise into the air on long poles or dangle from balloons.” “Many beekeepers and scientists have long suspected that drones gather in large numbers in places that remain stable year after year, but it’s incredibly difficult to study such behavior when the drones are so small and fly so high above us,” says Woodgate. This let them watch where the drones ended up, without using a lure to bias the bees’ natural behavior. Joe Woodgate and his colleagues used a technique called harmonic radar tracking to analyze the flight patterns of individual drones during mating flights. Drones, therefore, may have ostensibly formed congregation areas even in the absence of an existing gathering, and for some scientists, the very existence of drone congregation areas is still an unsettled question.īut new research from Queen Mary University of London, England, is providing some answers. But this nugget of knowledge is debated among scientists, since most of the data that led researchers to this conclusion used lures to attract the drones. New research is settling the debate over whether drone congregation areas really existĪ common honey bee party fact is that drones fly to congregation areas to find a queen. ![]()
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