Honey bees mate only in flight, roughly fifteen to two hundred feet high (five to sixty meters), a practice that has made studying this area of reproduction challenging. In the spring and summer months on calm, clear, warm afternoons, drones leave the hive and fly to places called drone congregation areas (DCAs) where drones from different colonies gather and fly around looking for queens with which to mate. DCAs are small areas, with diam-i eters between 100 and 650 feet (30 to 200 meters).
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