Bionic bee pulling a nail out of the wall

Bionic bees will replace drones in aerial reconnaissance tasks

The University of Washington has developed a design for tiny "backpacks" that can be put on bees. They do not prevent insects from performing their usual tasks, and do not give control over them. This is just a container for a small set of sensors, but the concept itself can be widely used.

Only 107 milligrams of cargo is placed in a bee backpack, and therefore it will not work to put a camera or a GPS module. So far, there is a simple radio beacon for determining the coordinates of a bee by triangulation, a thermometer, humidity and lighting sensors, a battery and a memory of only 30 kilobytes. In the future, developers want to replace it with a transmitter to broadcast the signal online directly to the base station. And, perhaps, engineers will be able to design very light and small cameras to get at least some kind of picture.