Nope, they’re not bees, locust or any living thing as a matter of fact, they’re robots. Yes robots that would be able to function as part of a bigger organism or machine. They are the next big thing that robotics experts are trying to perfect for they are cheap and they can be made into smaller, more compact machines. Remember the spiders deployed in the movie “The Minority Report”, the ones that looked like disks which transformed into miniature retinal scanners that think on their own, going through all obstacles so all the residents to see if the character of “Tom†was in there. That’s the type of development in the robotics world scientists are trying to perfect and use as a cheaper and more manageable system for all kinds of uses.
Take a look at an ant hill and you see individual ants that as individuals are quite easy to subdue. Get those same ants and combine them to make-up the colony, that’s another story, you’ll end up with tons of welts as you run for cover wherever you could. As it turns out, smaller more autonomous robots can be made cheaper with the advent of advances in micro-engineering where they are working to create mechanical and electro-mechanical parts out of atoms making a whole robot the size of micrometers, even nanometers. Imagine being able to inject a syringe-full of these engineered microscopic repair robots suspended in a solution into the human body to manually remove a blood clot in the heart. Or better yet, design them to take out the free radicals in the blood to halt the aging process which plagues all of us, delaying it by decades if not indefinitely. Or take the place of the body’s immune system for AIDS sufferers killing germs and bacteria that can pose a threat to health. The possibilities are endless