Deformed wing virus (DWV) in western honey bees (Apis mellifera) often remains asymptomatic in workers and drones, and symptoms have never been described from queens. However, intense infections linked to parasitism by the mite Varroa destructor can cause worker wing deformity and death within 67 h of emergence. Ten workers (eight with deformed wings and two with normal wings) and three drones ...

Data gathered through community-based forest monitoring (CBFM) programs may be as accurate as those gathered by professional scientists, but acquired at a much lower cost and capable of providing more detailed data about the occurrence, extent and drivers of forest loss, degradation and regrowth at the community scale. In addition, CBFM enables greater survey repeatability. Therefore, CBFM shou...

Honey bees provide a model system to elucidate the relationship between sociality and complex behaviors within the same species, as females (workers) are highly social and males (drones) are more solitary. We report on aversive learning studies in drone and worker honey bees (Apis mellifera anatolica) in escape, punishment and discriminative punishment situations. In all three experiments, a ne...

Sex-related differences in susceptibility to pathogens are a common phenomenon in animals. In the eusocial Hymenoptera the two female castes, workers and queens, are diploid and males are haploid. The haploid susceptibility hypothesis predicts that haploid males are more susceptible to pathogen infections compared to females. Here we test this hypothesis using adult male (drone) and female (wor...

The individual roles of honeybee workers and drones in heat regulation were investigated using single combs of bees and brood (about 1,000 individuals) placed in boxes at 15 degrees C. After 1 h and before cluster formation, I measured the elevation of bee thoracic surface temperature (Tths) above local ambient temperature (Ta). Bees were then left overnight at 15 degrees C. During the preclust...

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or 'drones', appear to offer a flexible, accurate and affordable solution to some of the technical challenges of nature conservation monitoring and law enforcement. However, little attention has been given to their possible social impacts. In this paper, I review the possible social impacts of using drones for conservation, including on safety, privacy, psychological w...

We consider a drone-based communication network, where several drones hover above an area and serve as mobile remote radio heads for a large number of mobile users. We assume that the drones employ free space optical (FSO) links for fronthauling of the users’ data to a central unit. The main focus of this paper is to quantify the geometric loss of the FSO channel arising from random fluctuation...

In the last decade, drones became frequently used to provide eye-in-the-sky overview in the outdoor environment. They are widely used for surveillance, mapping and exploring unknown terrains. Their main advantage compared to the other types of robots is that they can fly above obstacles and rough terrains and they can quickly cover large areas. These properties also open a new application; dron...

In recent years, the proliferation of commercial drone or unmanned aircraft system (UAS) applications in the United States has generated significant discussion and controversy among legal scholars and practitioners attempting to navigate this budding industry . The drone phenomenon is just starting to catch on in the area of environmental monitoring and enforcement . There is immense potential ...