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Aerial attack on my drone

skydeep

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Location
Miami beach, Florida
Yesterday 19 June 2020 I sent my drone up about 120 feet altitude and it was attacked by a swarm of bees following my drone and just constantly attacking its surrounding it orbiting it. It was aat they would attack or follow I don’t know if they were talking or thinking it’s the queen bee but it was surprising to see that they were all around my my drone and it was a far away from any kind of obstacle or anything it was pretty high I sent it up twice for the same thing happened I got a picture of one of the beers that got cut up by one of the propellers
 
Maybe the Bee swarm was moving to a new site with their queen. They will swarm around any object even if it's moving. My neighbour had a swarm attatch itself to her blowing in the wind bedsheets. Enjoy the experience with nature.
 
Bees know what the queen looks like and where she is, so that isn’t the draw. You just happened to be in “their” area. Move away quickly, (100 yards)they won’t follow very far.
 
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Had the same happen to me, ive only had the drone a few weeks, but it wasn't a swarm it was say 5 or 6 buzzing around it, hight was only about 20m.
 
Hello Skydeep,
Thanks for your posting. This has happened to me several times now but with different bees.
I have seen at least a dozen postings now of bees attacking drones.
I'm an entomology professor at the University of Arizona here in Tucson.
I study pollination ecology and also native soltiary ground-nesting bees, their nesting and
mating biology. Long story short, three times now in the past several months, I've had my
Mavic2 Pro attacked by male and female bees in the genus Centris (C. pallida and C. caesalpiniea).
Sadly, the Mavic acted like a flying Cuisinart. Many bees chopped to bits.

It could be visual and acoustic due to sound pressure waves they might be detecting. I lost my
Mavic last month due to a signal disconnect in some treacherous badlands. Did not retrieve it.
I have recordings of the bee wingbeat frequency (166Hz) and the Mavic sound which as you
might imagine is not as clean with lots of white noise and higher level harmonics. Next year I
plan to do some careful tests to see if the bees are atrracted visually or acoustically. If you
look at the bee literature, bees have been thought to be deaf to airborne sounds except at
very close range (I'm talking a few centimeters not many meters from a drone AC).

Your situation: Likely that you were flying in/near a DCA. That is a Drone Congregation Area.
Honey bee males (drones) fly to specific geographic sites and rapidly fly about 30 to 100 ft.
high in circular patterns. Whenever they spot a small dark spot (thinking it is a virgin queen)
they pursue it and mate if they can. The drone honey bees have upward looking holoptic
compound eyes. That way they can see a honey bee queen flying above them and chase her.

Best,
Steve
 
Interestingly I was filming some of our native bumblebees today from around a couple of feet away with the mini. They paid it no attention whatsoever. Sending the air 2 to have a look provoked an agressive response. No Bees were harmed during this experiment. There seems to be some truth in the harmonics theory.
 
A couple of days ago i had a crow trying to get my drone. After many attempts, it flew away and came back with 3 more and they were all trying to get the drone. It put my skills and my blood pressure to the test till i managed to evade them and land back.
 
If you have any sizable remains of the bees it might be of use to Buzzman to post photos of the remains. Male honey bees are appreciably bigger than worker caste (female) honey bees and the abdomen of males is, from memory, much less tapered than that of workers.
Here people often confuse worker honey bees, especially some of the banded varieties, e.g. Buckfasts, with wasps.

To Buzzman is it possible that these quadcopters encountered a swarm, chopped up the queen and coated the quadcopter with her remains and that the swarm then pursued her 'scent'?
 
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9-0-2 (9-oxodec-2-decenoic acid and similar acids) are the
honey bee queen substance, queen pheromone. I don't think that the quadcopter would become coated with queen pheromone. I think it is purely visual, and perhaps "auditory" (bees have no ears but they do have pressure-sensitive organs (Johnston's organ in the base of their antennae). I had lots of splattered Centris male remains on the body of my Mavic2Pro.
cheers,
Steve
 
Come on guys... don't fly if there are bees around.

I am not one of those freaks that don't walk not to trample on ants but still...I am already saddened enough when I see the front of my car these days.
 
For what the information is worth male honey bees are stingless and swarms, (a fledgling colony in the making) tend to be fairly docile (in the UK at least), I have actually picked one off a bush with my bare hands.
I WOULD NOT try it in the USA etc. if there were Africanised bees in the area.
 

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