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It is year 2098. Enslaved women and children hang grapes in fruit trees to apply pollen to countless blossoms with fine brushes. Since “The collapse” and disappearance of insects, pollination of crops must be done completely by human hand. – This scene comes from Maja lundes bestseller novel The History of Bees, and who knows that even today in parts of China fruit trees are pollinated by hand, such a scenario can imagine quite well.
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But maybe it doesn’t have to happen, because until n robot bees have taken over pollination. Perhaps not a absurd idea, given years of recurring reports of bee colonies and new insights into what makes insects die worldwide. In Chinese Sichuan, insect fauna was eliminated by pesticides, by way. In such areas, re might actually be a need for technical solutions.
At any rate, Japanese Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, works on mini-drones that transmit pollen. With a four-inch, remote-controlled drone, Miyako and his working group actually managed to transfer pollen grains from dust bags of a Japanese lily to flower scar of anor flower. While pollen is stuck in fine body hair in case of real bees, Miyako’s pollination robot holds it with horse hair bristles. You are liable for a special gel, or as researcher and his team say, an ionized liquid (Chem, Amador Hu, 2017).
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Since Miyako published first results in trade magazine Chem (Chechetka Yu Tange Miyako, 2017), net is to read headlines as Japanese researchers invent flower-pollinating mini drones to save plant world. Miyako himself does not want to preserve whole flora from death, but: “This technology can lead to development of an innovative artificial pollinator against global Bestäuberkrise,” he writes. Autonomous drones instead of bees. Robobee instead of Bee Maja. But how sensible and realistic is that?
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In course of a year, a honey bienenvolk forms 100,000 to 200,000 collection bees. When each of m lives for about 10 days and visits 1,000 flowers a day, people come to a pollination capacity of one to two billion flowers per season. Even if such extrapolations are inaccurate, y illustrate magnitudes: even if mini-drones would one day function as researchers imagine, one would need a considerable amount of surrendering robo-bees, To get close to performance of a single beehive. Every single drone would have to be equipped with artificial intelligence and high-resolution cameras to be self-steering and able to fly in swarm.
Honey bees What honey bees afford
The honeybee is most industrious pollinator and an adaptable generalist. Their “List of customers” in realm of flowering plants comprises some 170,000 species. In addition, re are around 20,000 species of wild bees, such as bumblebees and wall bees, of which many are also important and sometimes highly specialized pollinators. Not to mention countless beetles, flies, butterflies, ants and bugs, to birds, bats and monkeys, all of which contribute to pollination of flowering plants.
In addition, re are currently around 80 million honey Bienenvölker worldwide. Its members perform complex cognitive and communicative services in order to ensure optimal nectar and pollen yield for mselves and thus also effective pollination of plants. Added to this is variety of flower forms: large, relatively stable and wide open flowers of fruit trees, such as apple and pear or Japanese lilies used in laboratory experiment, may still be suitable for control with a drone. In case of blossoms whose stamens and pencils are hidden, such as pumpkins or clover, this becomes much more difficult. Strawberry or peanut blossoms grow ground level and blueberries form small, bell-like flowers. Each flower shape would have its own technical challenge.
