It's a cricket, it's a dragonfly, It's a BumbleBee, nope it's the 'Flight of the Robotic Bee"

It's a cricket, it's a dragonfly, It's a BumbleBee, nope it's the 'Flight of the Robotic Bee".(NPR).
Do bees, swarms of bees, make you nervous? Maybe not. Maybe they remind you of honey, flowers and warm summer days. You stay out of their way and they stay out of yours. What if, however, the bees weren't bees at all but hundreds (or thousands) of autonomous microbots, facsimiles of the real thing, buzzing around in the real world?
That's not Hollywood fantasy any more. It appears to be within reach. Researchers in the Microrobotics Lab at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences say that they expect their Robobees project will demonstrate flying, autonomous micro-air-vehicles modeled on insects within the next 2 1/2 years.
 It won't be easy, according to Rob Wood, the project's principal investigator.
"The challenges that you get when you scale these things down mean that you have to reinvent everything, everything has to come from scratch, every one of the technologies," Wood said in an interview last week. "There is nothing off the shelf."
His team has recently taken a significant step forward with the demonstration of a manufacturing process that they believe will pave the way to industrial-scale production of microbots, spitting out thousands of them with ease.
The prototype creature built with this process has been dubbed the "Mobee," short for Monolithic Bee. With its carbon-fiber airframe and titanium wings, it doesn't really look like a bee. It's more like an intricate box frame with insect-like wings. The creatures are so lightweight that Harvard says the mass of 63 Mobees is equal to the mass of one United States quarter.Read and see the full story here.