Interesting discrepancy between this study and the 2019 paper from Yves Le Conte. The latter showed - by observing drone flights from the hive entrance - that there was almost no drone flight activity between the cessation of the orientation flights and the onset of mating flights. In 'summer' this was 5 days long, in 'spring' 12 days. In contrast, the Michael Smith paper shows no such hiatus.
Both studies were conducted during predominantly excellent weather and it would be interesting to see what happens in the more typical weather when we're trying to get our queens mated.
Reyes, M., Crauser, D., Prado, A., and Le Conte, Y. (2019) Flight activity of honey bee (Apis mellifera) drones. Apidologie 50: 669–680 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-019-00677-w.
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