BF Hornet Performance

This past Saturday, August 14 I made this recording of a swarm of bald-faced hornets who have been building a nest in our front yard magnolia tree.  I ended up recording them for over 3 hours as I could not retrieve my equipment – to finally extract my equipment I had to dress up for winter wearing a coat designed for 20 degrees below “0”, 2 mosquito screen hats, and work gloves that only resulted in one sting through the top of my left-hand glove– I felt pretty foolish until I heard the recording.  

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The excerpt here is right after placing the microphone at the mouth of the nest – there is a slight lull in their sound until they discovered the mic and then began to swarm.  The whole recording is 3+ hours. An observation of the recording that I noted while looking at the full 3-hour waveform is that the hornets took brief breaks swarming around the microphone resulting in an increase in a swarm that would last about 10-15 minutes and a lull that lasted approximately 2-3.

For audio geeks – I recorded using a stereo Sennheiser ME short shotgun microphone using a 4Chan Zoom with no monitoring. Sound of the hornets can be heard hitting the zeppelin, audio cable, paper nest, and the leaves of the magnolia tree where the nest is located.