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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Almost certainly the heat.

I don't think it's the heat, rather, the wasps seem attracted to the radio wave EM radiation. I'm not sure why, but I've seen it first hand when turning on high powered outdoor point-to-point WiFi antennas (eg. airMAX LiteBeam 5AC). The moment I connected the power, several wasps immediately began crowding around the antenna.

The wasps are of similar size to the wavelengths of 5 Ghz RF frequencies. It seems plausible that they experience the absorbed energy quite differently.

Maybe it's like a pleasant warmth from within and they just fly towards the direction of increasing warmth. I guess it wouldn't take many dBms of absorbed power to slightly heat a wasp.

Monkeys like to be microwaved; may be a similar effect.

Humans, too: https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2012.3787

I remember treatments like these happened in GP's offices in the 1980s.

Very curious how you get IRB approval to microwave monkeys.

There is no IRB for monkeys.

The animal equivalent to an IRB is usually an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), but the laws they are subject to vary with jurisdiction, and their use is optional if your grant provider (i.e. NIH) or academic publisher do not require them.

I beg your pardon?

Try it: you'll see. Low power recommended.

Humans like to sit in saunas.

It's a useful small tool for low cost Ethernet bridges but a sub $200 ubiquiti 802.11ac point to point bridge is not a high powered radio, electrically they max out at something like 200 milliwatts, the rest of the eirp comes from the gain of the antenna.

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