For our October 26th class, all the teams had the opportunity to present their projects and receive feedback from peers and faculty. The general feedback for all groups was to create a stronger narrative to sell why our solutions are necessary and why our issue is so pressing. This is definitely a big part of our own project; although more and more people are aware of the importance of honey bees as their populations die out, there are still many people that need to be informed about what makes these insects so vital to our agricultural industries. We also have to convince people that bees are not just the tiny, annoying insects that we’ve been conditioned to think of them as. For our project in particular, we will definitely need to add a bill of materials which lays out the specific technology we will be using in our prototype to lend some credibility to our project.
Our potential client and on-campus mentor, German Perilla, also visited class to watch our presentation. Dr. Perilla is a professor on campus an head of the Honey Bee Intiative program at GMU. We reached out to him because we thought it would be great to have a local resource and mentor available to us, and were sure that he could list some of the issues that honey bees face to help us narrow down the design and scope of our drone. It was great to finally meet him face-to-face, and we got to clarify any lingering questions. Our main concern was whether or not a UAV would disturb the honey bee congregation at all, but German has assured us that our particular plan shouldn’t affect or harm the drones in any way. In the picture, German is showing our team the mechanism for artificially inseminating queen bees. He also showed us the tools used for capturing the drones, which was surprisingly exactly how you might imagine capturing bugs– a big net. This is another potential application for UAVs in the field of honey bees; being able to have a drone remotely capture and transport these bees could be a great technology update for apiarists. But that, of course, is another project for another day.
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