Funny story about Honey Beeez .
My wife and I have a modest honey farm up here in Alberta.
She is the expert and I am the and I’m the trusty assistant/grunt , and yes that’s printed on my bee suit .
Well last summer I was flying my own drone , a Parrot Anafi (big mistake ) , so I thought I’ll go take some video and pictures of some of our hives as the boss lady does bee presentations to library’s and schools etc .
Well I was about 200 m from the hives lining up my aerial views of one group of hives , so that worked out ok .
So then I started to walk up closer to the hives to get some
closer footage and as I got closer I could hear this ticking noise quite fast so I figured it must be my drone ticking for whatever the issue was .
So I brought it down to see what was up and as it lowered to eye height (don’t worry at a safe distance of course ) to figure out the strange noise was , all of a sudden bees by the hundreds or thousands ( bee counting isn’t my strong point ) just came from the hives and started to attack my drone .
So then it dawned on me where the mysterious ticking was coming from .
Not having my bee armour on I beat a hasty retreat , really they weren’t interested in me but they were defending their homes .
I called back The Anafi as I was running away but the bees kept coming so half way home completely exhausted we got back to the launch point and the majority of the bees had returned home or had been liquidized.
My drone landed and the angriest bees disappeared almost as fast as the props stopped .
Of course my Anafi was just thick with miscellaneous bee parts and dripping in bee juice .
I figured the same thing many of you mentioned that it was the noise that affected them and saw it as big as it was to be a very real threat to their livelihood, so they went full out to kill the mechanical beast in great numbers .
Well after quite some effort I scraped and washed of the bee glue on my drone and it lived to.fly an other day ( for a while anyways) .
So the pitch or whine from either the blades or motors must have duplicated a bee eating hornet or similar flying insect .
Oh and I never mentioned it to my Bee boss / wife , so nobody tell her please . I might get demoted , oh I am all ready at the very bottom of the pay grade .
So if you see any bee hives when you’re out flying keep you distance. !!!! You have been warned !!!.
I guess different models of drones may produce different noise patterns , or they could all bee very similar because of the motors and props being similar.
I should do some testing to see what drones affect the bees the most all for the advancement of science of course .
Anybody care to donate to the cause , new models preferred , like a new Mavic air would be an essential test candidate.
Remember don’t fly too high unless over bees and their hives .