Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 10, 2017

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REAL LIFE NEWS: DRONE VS HORNETS

by Hazed

A drone that was sent to scout out the location of a hornets nest was attacked by the insects and sprayed with venom.

The nest was on the island of Jersey, off the northern coast of France. Crews were using the drone to take a closer look at it using infrared and high resolution cameras, when the hornets, drawn by the sound of its propellers, swarmed the machine.

The Asian hornets are an environmental risk to other pollinators such as bees, wasps and dragonflies – and are dangerous to humans as well. This nest was thought to contain about 6,000 hornets. The Department for the Environment on Jersey need to get rid of the nest in the next few weeks, before queens emerge from it, as Bob Hogge of the Jersey Beekeepers Association explained: “there are about 200 queens in each nest and once they’re out and mated they’re lost to us. And if each one of those makes a nest like this one, very soon the island will be overrun.”

He and his colleagues had been trying to track this nest down for the past five weeks. They marked hornets and measured how long it took them to fly between their nest and specialised bait they had put down to find the nest. When they thought they had got the right general area they called in the Department for the Environment to help pinpoint its location in a canopy of trees.

Now pest controllers will return and cut through the canopy with chainsaws, then put a net over the nest and spray it with pesticides to kill the hornets.

Meanwhile they continue to look for other nests. Let’s hope the drone survives any further encounters with angry hornets.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-41141330

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