Robot Bees Take Wing
Posted on August 10th, 2018 by Mary Lord
Without bees to pollinate flowers, there would be no fruit to harvest. As bee deaths outpace the hives’ ability to regenerate — in 2016, the United States lost 44 percent of all honeybee colonies — farmers have turned to researchers for help. One partial solution already is in the works: an insect-sized drone capable of artificial pollination.
Image ©Savannah School of Art and Design
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Tags: Agricultural Engineering, bees, colony collapse, drone, Eijiro Miyako, Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, NPR, pollinator, Robotics
Middle school students design a robotic “bee” that would have the potential to pollinate crops in place of a native bee and then evaluate their model against real pollinators.
Students in grades 3 to 5 learn about the engineering design process by making a 2-dimensional model (graphic illustration) of an apparatus that will pollinate a field.
Indoor ‘vertical farming’ could be an answer to urban food needs and shrinking agricultural space – if cost and energy obstacles can be overcome. Already, pioneers are sprouting up in places like Japan, Singapore, and in U.S. university “closed environment agriculture” labs.
From the air or highway, America’s fruited plains present a uniform vista of vast abundance. Not to Amy Kaleita. The associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University sees a “somewhat chaotic” array of micro-plots, each with unique hydrology, root depths, soil characteristics – all of them ripe opportunities for smart technology to enhance both sustainability and food production using “precision conservation.”
In this three-part activity, students in grades 5 to 7 act as agricultural engineers, learning about and testing the effectiveness of a sustainable pest-control technique that uses organic waste and sunlight rather than toxic chemicals to reduce weeds. 
In this week-long activity, student teams in grades 5 – 7 study the effects of evaporation by observing and measuring the ongoing evaporation of water in pans that contain soil or other variables, then then assess what factors may affect evaporation.
As one of the worst droughts in decades continues to shrivel reservoirs and sear fields, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated more than half of all counties – 1,584 in 32 states – primary disaster areas this growing season. While the dry, hot spell has decimated agriculture, it also has strained the steel, asphalt, and other engineered parts of the nation’s infrastructure.
In this service-learning activity, teams of students in grades 10-12 learn the basic principles of fluid dynamics by designing and testing a prototype system to pipe water from a storage tank to a Tippy Tap hand-washing station similar to inexpensive homemade devices used extensively in the developing world.
