Drones

Tiny drones gel their hair to help pollinate plants

To deal with the problem of declining bee populations, scientists are developing pollinating drones that could lend a hand
Dr Eijiro Miyako
To deal with the problem of declining bee populations, scientists are developing pollinating drones that could lend a hand
Dr Eijiro Miyako

Without bees, the wingmen of the plant world, much of the food we eat would be a lot harder to come by – so their worldwide decline is cause for alarm. While some scientists are fighting to study and save the bees, a team from Japan has found a way to give them a little high-tech help, in the form of tiny pollen-collecting drones covered in a sticky gel and animal hairs.

The research began with a bottle of gel cast aside after a failed experiment in 2007. Sitting forgotten in a cupboard in the lab for all this time, it was found in a surprisingly good condition during a cleanup. Being super sticky, the team thought the gel might be useful as a kind of pollen glue.

"This project is the result of serendipity," says Eijiro Miyako, senior author of the study. "We were surprised that after eight years, the ionic gel didn't degrade and was still so viscous. Conventional gels are mainly made of water and can't be used for a long time, so we decided to use this material for research."

To test the gel's prowess at picking up pollen, the researchers put droplets of it onto the backs of ants, and had them wander around in a box full of tulips. Unsurprisingly, the ants with the gel gathered much more pollen than those that enjoyed an unencumbered trip through the tulips.

With a small, inexpensive store-bought drone in hand, the next step was to test whether it could be slathered with the gel and used as a kind of robo-bee. In nature, bees are covered with scopa, tiny branching hairs that hold grains of pollen, and in an attempt to mimic that, the team gave the drone a horse hair wig. That gives the pollen more surface area to cling to, and creates a touch of static electricity to keep it there.

And it worked. With a combination of the hair and gel, the team flew the drones from flower to flower, in this case Japanese lilies, and found that they were effective artificial pollinators. A control group, which made the same trip without a cargo of gelled hair, were unsurprisingly useless at pollination.

"The findings, which will have applications for agriculture and robotics, among others, could lead to the development of artificial pollinators and help counter the problems caused by declining honeybee populations," says Miyako. "We believe that robotic pollinators could be trained to learn pollination paths using global positioning systems and artificial intelligence."

Such future pollinating drones could also be fitted with other bee-inspired sensing systems, like those that mimic the eyes, brains and navigational senses of the insects, to help build an autonomous, robotic work force to take some of the pressure off nature's busy bees. Tests on live houseflies also found that the gel works well as a camouflage as it changes color in response to different sources of light, which could keep predators at bay.

The research was published in the journal Chem.

Source: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology via Science Daily

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6 comments
ljaques
Great, so now, when our pesticides and herbicides have killed all the bees, we may have a chance to save humanity.
Bob Flint
The effort & human energy required to create this device to go from flower to flower is silly even if the "robobee " could fly on it's own knowing which flower it's been to, and where to go next, then come back to get charged before the wind or a bird takes it out...focus on helping the natural bees thrive & pollinate that's their job....
Paul Anthony
I wonder how they will overcome a) birds eating them b) spiders catching them c) the sheer number of locations d) range e) weather
Nahor
Even bees are being replaced with automation!
ADVENTUREMUFFIN
When scaled up and costs are presented, keeping the bees healthy is a far less costly alternative, even reflecting the costs of productivity reduction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3339477/ Sometimes, finding the simple solution is the most elegant. David
Bob
The little drone propellers will get tangled so quickly and the range so short that this will have very limited application. The comments about the birds are quite accurate. My hand sized drone gets knocked out of the air on a regular basis by the local barn swallows. A smaller drone wouldn't last five minutes.