Some fruits, such as tomatoes, self-pollinate. But three-quarters of all crops, including almonds, apples, lemons and squash, require birds and insects—particularly bees—to spread pollen from one flower to another.

“No bees, no almonds. It’s that simple,” almond grower Brian Paddock, owner of Capay Hills Orchard near Esparto, California, told National Public Radio in a March, 3, 2017, broadcast.

Such cross-pollination increases genetic diversity. Thus, for many farmers, the mysterious collapse of bee colonies nationwide — in 2016, the United States lost 44 percent of all honeybee colonies — is a big problem.

Eijiro Miyako, an engineer at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, has generated a lot of buzz lately for developing a robotic worker bee. At four centimeters (roughly 1.6 inches) across, his mechanical pollinator is much chunkier than even a fat bumble bee. But in a test, its body’s gel-coated horse hairs could pick up and release pollen between Japanese lilies like its real counterpart.

While Miyako has yet to confirm that the pollination produces seeds, he envisions that one day his remote-controlled drones, outfitted with computer vision to recognize flowers on their own, could work alongside real bees.

Still, many hurdles remain. Artificial pollination, as it exists today, is a tedious process. Using a brush to apply the pollen, a person can pollinate five to 10 almond trees a day. Considering that each almond flower on millions of acres must be pollinated to set the nut, it would take a “mind-boggling” swarm of robotic drones to replace bees.

Quinn McFrederick, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, sees potential for eventually using drones to pollinate commercial crops, especially if programmed with artificial intelligence. But he’d rather see effort expended on protecting natural pollinators rather than developing new technology. “I would not like to live in a world where bees are replaced by plastic machines. Let’s focus on protecting the biodiversity we still have left.”

Another problem: There’s no battery small enough to power robo-bees, reports PBS’s NOVA in this short clip.

This article includes a First Look report by Thomas K. Grose from the March/April issue of ASEE’s Prism magazine.

Filed under: Special Features

Tags: Agricultural Engineering, bees, colony collapse, drone, Eijiro Miyako, Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, NPR, pollinator, Robotics