Buzzing for the bumblebee drone replacement

9th March 2017

Anna Flockett

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The humble bumblebee gets a lot of grief - often associated with the evil wasp that is the scourge of our summer picnics. The bee however, does have a purpose to pollinate our plants and flowers. But it is a sad fact that the population of bees is decreasing in many parts of the world, and although the reason that our beloved bees are in trouble is unclear, some technologists have come up with a solution.

Mechanical bees - can drones fly flower-spreading pollen instead?

There are some efforts in Japan where investigators at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science, in Tsukuba, were looking for new uses for sticky substances called ionic liquid gels that have unusual physical properties.

The team used $100 drones from Amazon to make the pollinators and then added patches of horsehair to their undersides. After painting on the gels, which are moist and are about as sticky as a Post-It note, the drones were ready to grab and release pollen grains.

The drones were then flown to smack into the male and female parts of pink and white Japanese lilies and according to project leader Eijiro Miyako it’s the first time a drone has pollinated a flower.

Of course this invention is still no replacement for the bumblebee, and according to a Californian ‘bee broker’ Joe Traynor, the almond industry in that state alone requires 1.8 million hives—containing around 35 billion bees—to pollinate 900,000 acres of almond trees that sprout three trillion flowers.

Traynor added: “I don’t see any technology that could replace bees.”

The pollination issue still need addressing even whilst the bees are still around, we need alternatives and we need them now. A large number of bees have disappeared in some parts of China, and due to this fruit orchards are already being pollinated by hand by workers who climb trees with long brushes to touch every flower.

But the idea of the flower swatting drone doesn’t come close to being as efficient as a human with a brush, one issue is the fact that it is being flown with a remote control, and it’s impossible to replace bees with a manual drone.

Miyako commented that it was challenging to get a bull’s-eye even though a lily, with its extravagant, protruding sex organs, is the probably the easiest target in the whole plant kingdom.

However, the Japanese researchers are not the only team looking at artificial bees, an invention firm Intellectual Ventures, run by former Microsoft CSO Nathan Myhrvold, filed a patent application in 2015 for flying pollinators guided across a farm using a computerised flight plan.

And last year a video of a hovering drone able to tickle plastic flowers with a brush was released by a group of Polish scientists.

Miyako added: “It will be perfectly feasible to pollinate plants in the open with a drone, but only with the addition of high-resolution cameras, GPS, and maybe artificial intelligence, features that could be challenging to add to an ultra-small airborne robot.”