As Bee Population Declines, Researchers Looking Into Drones To Pollinate Flowers

While President Donald Trump’s administration delays the first-ever listing of a bee species in the continental U.S. as endangered, researchers are trying to find out if a drone could spread pollen instead, according to the MIT Technology Review.

The decrease of pollinators and high mortality rates of honey bee colonies are a major concern in the U.S. and worldwide, according to The Bee Informed Partnership. Recently, a team of researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science looked into ionic liquid gels, which are as sticky as Post-It notes, to pollinate flowers.

To make a pollinator, researchers bought $100 drones from Amazon and added patches of horsehair to their undersides and painted on the gels. The drones were then ready to grab and release pollen grains.

The drones swipe into the male and female parts of Japanese lilies (you can see a video of it here ). The project leader, Eijiro Miyako, said it’s the first time a drone has pollinated a flower.

Although the drone pollinator is a great use of technology for nature, it still won’t be enough to replace the vital work of bees. However, the drones offers an alternative as bee populations decline worldwide.

In certain parts of China, where bees have disappeared, fruit orchards are being pollinated by hand by humans. Workers get on top of trees with a long brush to pollinate flowers.

Unfortunately, the drone isn’t close to working as well as humans do, since they’re flown by remote and “it’s impossible to replace bees with a manual drone,” Miyako said. Targeting with a drone is still challenging, even with lilies, which are probably the easiest target in the whole plant kingdom. Miyako also said “it will be perfectly feasible” to pollinate plants with a drone, but it still needs improvements, such as high-resolution cameras, GPS and maybe artificial intelligence, which could be hard to implement on a small airborne robot.

The specific reason why bees are dying is unknown, but it is believed the unprecedented rate of death for bees is due to climate change, while some scientists think bee populations have been impacted by pesticides. Forty-four percent of all honeybee colonies were lost in 2015, with similar levels of loss recorded in previous years, a study shows.