One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky glue to the under part of it.
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees-but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn't just worrisome because it could spoil ecosystems. but also, because it could spoil agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.
Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven't figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It's very tough work." said Senior author Elijio Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a kind of glue, one he'd considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn't dried up or broke down at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.
The chemist noticed that when dropped, the glue absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen. He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to imitate a bee's furry body. They coated those horsehairs in the glue, and then controlled the drones over flowers, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the glue had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the glue.
Mivako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There's a lot of work to be done before that's a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.
