Talk:Drone congregation area

A fact from Drone congregation area appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 June 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that no one knows how honeybee drones from hundreds of different colonies all converge on the same drone congregation areas to mate?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/June. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Drone congregation area.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Bruxton (talk) 14:37, 20 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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... that honeybee drones can consistently converge on the local drone congregation areas to mate, even when brought in from far away? Source: Tribe, G. D. (1982). "Drone mating assemblies". South African Bee Journal. 54: 99.
ALT 1 ... that scientists don't know how drone bees find the same congregation areas consistently across centuries? Source: Tribe, G. D. (1982). "Drone mating assemblies". South African Bee Journal. 54: 99.
ALT 2 ... that no one knows how honeybee drones from hundreds of different colonies all converge on the same drone congregation areas to mate? Source: Woodgate, Joseph L.; Makinson, James C.; Rossi, Natacha; Lim, Ka S.; Reynolds, Andrew M.; Rawlings, Christopher J.; Chittka, Lars (June 2021). "Harmonic radar tracking reveals that honeybee drones navigate between multiple aerial leks". iScience. 24 (6): 102499. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.102499. PMC 8257961. PMID 34308279. and Baudry, E.; Solignac, M.; Garnery, L.; Gries, M.; Cornuet, J.; Koeniger, N. (22 October 1998). "Relatedness among honeybees (Apis mellifera) of a drone congregation". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 265 (1409): 2009–2014. doi:10.1098/rspb.1998.0533. PMC 1689479.
- Reviewed: QPQ exempt
- Comment: I can provide a copy of the source to anyone who's curious; it's not easy to find. Thanks to User:Tamzin for suggesting ALT1.

Created by Vahurzpu (talk). Self-nominated at 21:13, 12 June 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Drone congregation area; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

I will review this. TompaDompa (talk) 02:39, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook eligibility:

Cited: - Offline/paywalled citation accepted in good faith
Interesting:
Other problems: - See below.

QPQ: None required.

Overall: Article created on 12 June, and meets the length requirement. All sources are, as far as I can tell, reliable for the material they are cited for—though I have not been able to access all of them. Earwig reveals no copyvio, and I didn't spot any instances of unacceptably WP:Close paraphrasing. There are no obvious neutrality issues. ALT1 is much more interesting to me, so let's go with that one. The source is accepted in good faith. The part about scientists not knowing what makes them so stable over time needs to be made explicit in the article (not knowing why they are at the places they are is mentioned, but why they stay there is a subtly different question). A single sentence along the lines of "The reasons for this stability over time and how new drones locate the congregation areas are not completely understood." toward the end of the first paragraph of the "Geographical features" section would do the trick (assuming it is properly sourced, of course). This is the nominator's third DYK nomination after Template:Did you know nominations/Winnie ille Pu and Template:Did you know nominations/Law of 4 February 1794, so they are QPQ exempt. Some comments about the content:

The unit conversions should only have one significant figure. I have implemented this change myself.
I'm guessing "inverted cone" means a cone where the apex points downwards and the base points upwards. That could probably be made more clear. A simple diagram might go a long way.
"Pheremone" should be "pheromone". I have fixed this.
It is considered best practices to not cite all the pages of a source if only a few of them are actually used. This is particularly relevant for the 58-page source cited for the IBRA standard procedure for locating drone congregation areas.

Ping Vahurzpu. On a non-DYK note, this was a surprisingly interesting read (coming from someone not already aware of this subject and without any particular pre-existing interest in bees), and I would encourage you to keep working on this article and perhaps nominate it for WP:Good article status down the line. TompaDompa (talk) 03:45, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@TompaDompa: Thanks for the review and the copyedits! Changes I made:

I reworded the "we don't know" portion in the article. It's not quite how you suggested, as I'm not sure that's accurate. There seems to be a general understanding that drone congregation areas are determined by some characteristics of the local environment, and they're stable over time because those characteristics don't change (at least in some cases). You could interpret that as "we do know why they're stable over time" (it's the environment) or "we don't know" (we don't know what it is about the environment). I added an ALT2 that I think is more defensible based on the sources I have.
I changed "inverted cone" to "upward-pointing" cone, which shouldn't be ambiguous. "Inverted cone" was taken directly from the source, and I myself was puzzled as to which orientation it was describing. However, I have since figured out from the raw data which orientation they meant.
I condensed the page range for the IBRA article to only the relevant section

Vahurzpu (talk) 02:34, 16 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Would the raw data in question be table 1 on page 167 here? I find it rather odd to describe a cone that tapers off going up as "inverted" (that would make a traffic cone "inverted" as well, which doesn't seem right to me), but that does indeed seem to be the intended meaning. Anyway,

ALT2 is ready. TompaDompa (talk) 03:27, 16 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]