4 ms·

"Drone" comes from worker bees, so "swarm" is at least consistent. But I found drone misleading here - I thought they'd be airborne. What's the scope of "drone

• Jedd 9y ago
  More importantly, worker bees aren't called drones. Drones are males - they don't actually do any work, living exclusively to have sex with a queen in spring. Once mating season is over, they are evicted from the hive to die - they are unable to fend for themselves. I believe it'd be rare to find drones as part of a swarm of bees in the normal case of a swarm. Worker bees are females. I've never heard them called anything other than a worker bee.
• friendzis 9y ago
  First, I do not think we have textbook definition of "drone" as such words change meaning based on what technologies are actually available, but quite a lot of technical terms come from or are inspired by science fiction. While I did not read lots of science fiction and most of that was not in English, I think "drone" for a long time used to mean something like "mobile robot capable of autonomously performing a series of tasks", mostly in contexts of mining, cargo transportation and reconnaissance. Airborne association with drones is quite a recent thing with rise of "military drones" (mostly recon) and subsequently manufacturers of RC multirotors using a word distancing their products from RC toys. RC multirotors are drones only in the sense that they maintain altitude and orientation autonomously.