If the ultimate buzz-kill were to occur, and bees (and other pollinating insects) go extinct, how will the flowers and trees and crops be pollinated?
The answer, according to some engineers, might make you say “how cute” and “how depressing” in the same breath.
In short, for the last 10 years, robot bees have been hyped as coming to the rescue.
The idea, as promoted to the public imagination, is that tiny mechanical bees would be loosed on the great outdoors, eventually in their billions, to pollinate plants that might otherwise go extinct.
But is this a good idea? Or a very bad one? And, despite all the media excitement, are robot bees anywhere close to being capable of doing the job?
Bees in trouble
In the northern winter of 2006-2007, commercial beekeepers along the East Coast of the United States lost up to 90 per cent of their honey bee colonies. They couldn’t explain the crash.
Since then, as reported at The Conversation, there have been unexplained high rates of bee colony deaths reported in Canada, Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Finland and Poland.
The main focus of that 2022 Conversation article was a study suggesting the “honeybee lifespan could be half what it was 50 years ago”.
It’s safe to say that most people who follow the news, even with a lazy eye, have heard that bees and other insects are in trouble.
And, because we rely on these insects to pollinate plants, including our food, we could be in trouble too.
How much trouble?
The Conversation – a great resource, where academic reports get a readable do-over by in-house journalists – has published 204 articles on bees.
They detail the problems they’re suffering – and the different ways engineers and scientists are using technology that might help or unintentionally hinder and hurt insects’ recovery from calamity.
An article from 2019 reports that as many as 40 per cent of the world’s insect species are in decline, and that insects are facing extinction rates eight times higher than vertebrates.
Overall, these trends “lead scientists to believe that about a third of all insect species – that’s nearly two million – may be threatened with extinction. And that figure is growing by over 100,000 species every year”.
All of this is happening so fast the IUCN red list of threatened species can’t keep up.
What’s causing the bee decline?
Invasive species (predators, parasites and disease-causing bacteria), exposure to pesticides, global warming and habitat destruction are effectively knocking insect species on the head.
Oh, there’s also been a decline in commercial beekeeping. In other words, people with great expertise are buzzing off.
Australia’s honey beekeepers have been lucky in some respects. The Varroa mite, the most serious pest for honey bees worldwide, hasn’t established itself here. And the mite isn’t a threat to native bees.
In June, NSW beekeepers got a fright when biosecurity surveillance detected Varroa mite in hives at the Port of Newcastle. The hives were destroyed and a biosecurity zone was set up.
If the mites were ever to get a foothold, the honey industry would face a loss of $70 million a year.
Robot bees to the rescue?
In 2013, after a dozen years tinkering in the lab, Harvard researchers announced the invention of the world’s smallest robotic insect capable of flight.
They called their critter the RoboBee. And boy, was the nerd media excited.
‘How Robo-Bees Could Save America’s Crops’ declared Popular Science.
‘These Little Robot Bees Could Pollinate the Fields of the Future,’ enthused the Smithsonian Magazine.
Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, inspired by the biology of a fly, and mounted with two wafer-thin wings that flapped at 120 times per seconds, the robot bees have been 12 years in the making.
The technical challenges to get this far were immense – as was the ambition for RoboBee’s real-world usefulness.
“Applications of RoboBees could include distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and assistance with crop pollination,” a press release said.
Except there was one small problem, the bees would need a very long extension cord to get out into the paddock:
“The prototypes are still tethered by a very thin power cable because there are no off-the-shelf solutions for energy storage that are small enough to be mounted on the robot’s body.
“High energy-density fuel cells must be developed before the RoboBees will be able to fly with much independence.”
Six years later…
In 2019, a re-designed RoboBee was given a second pair of wings.
This allowed researchers to cut the power cord and achieve untethered flight. A statement from Harvard explained:
“That extra lift, with no additional power requirements, allowed the researchers to cut the power cord – which has kept the RoboBee tethered for nearly a decade – and attach solar cells and an electronics panel to the vehicle.”
Wow, it’s really happening
The Harvard researchers predicted their RoboBee could be out in the fields by 2024. That isn’t likely to happen.
For a start, swarming technology and associated communications are not yet advanced enough. Reliable power supply remains an issue.
And the delicacy required for robot bees to secure the pollen from one flower and deliver it to another isn’t there yet.
The last press release from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering was in 2019: the RoboBee now had soft “muscles”, so it wouldn’t fall to pieces when inevitably crashing through the crops.
In the meantime, engineers the world over have taken up the challenge to build a better bee.
Cool, but dangerous to flowers
In 2017, Dr Eijiro Miyako, a materials chemist at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, took a four- centimetre toy drone, attached a patch of horse hair, and made it sticky with an ionic liquid gel.
Voila!
This fast and somewhat dangerous robot could be steered to collect and transfer pollen from one plant to another. Two immediate problems: firstly, the drone damaged the flowers, and you needed someone to steer the damn thing.
Given millions of bees are needed to pollinate large plantations, would farmers want to pay for millions of people to live out their Star War fantasies while slapping blossoms around?
Dr Miyako goes back to the drawing board
Dr Miyako and colleagues tried something different: a drone with a bubble gun, the soapy bubbles laden with pollen.
In lab experiments, they bombed pear flowers. It worked. The bubbles popped, the pollen stuck to the pistil (a flower’s female sex organ) and the grains grew pollen tubes. But they were stunted when hit by too many bubbles. Maybe the soap was to blame. Tinkering continues.
In the meantime, they used a toy bubble gun to blow bubble-pollen on three pear trees in an orchard.
According to a report in Science, this and other orchards are traditionally pollinated by hand with a feather brush. Why? Because bees don’t pollinate in low temperatures.
This was a more successful experiment
The bubble gun technique uses much less pollen:
“That means farmers would have to gather far less pollen before manually pollinating their flowers, if they’re adding it to a soap solution.”
Dr Miyako has trialled a drone bubble-gun bomber on fake lily flowers at various speeds and heights, for targeting purposes, until finding a sweet spot.
The drone was able to hit 90 per cent of the flowers. Which is pretty good, but too much pollen is still being wasted. Targeting refinements continue.
Dr Miyako is experimenting with an “environmentally-safe soap bubble solution that would biodegrade faster”.
This might turn into something. But not on windy days.
Where robotics actually works
There are robotics at work in pollinating crops and managing bees. But they don’t look like tiny insects with red lights for eyes.
An Israeli company, Arugga, uses robotics and AI to pollinate and manage crops in greenhouses. These robots are being used in North America, Australia and Finland.
Another Israeli company, Beewise, has invented a giant beehive run by an AI system that prevents bees from swarming and leaving the hive in mass, protects against predators, improves pollination and honey yields. In sort, the company boasts, bee hives can be managed at a distance via an iPhone.
The search continues
Still, the search continue for a magic swarm of robots. The latest incarnation is from Tampere University in Finland.
Researchers there have created a “passive robot” based on dandelion seeds. Those are the puffballs you see flying through the air in warm weather.
The engine of this robot, which looks like a fairy, is made of liquid crystalline elastomer (a polymer that displays rubber-like elasticity) that responds to light.
The fairy can be powered and controlled by a light source. “Such as a laser beam or LED,” the researchers say.
It’s all very cute. But there’s no way yet to control where these fairies might travel. They’re designed to pick up pollen which would then be discarded when the fairy bumps into something, hopefully the right kind of plant.
Among the many problems to solve: making the fairy biodegradable.
Getting real
Alan Dorin is Associate Professor, Department of Data Science & AI, University of Monash Data Futures Institute.
In 2020, he published a piece with the Royal Institute of Biology titled ‘The problem with robobees’.
He wrote:
“For several years some researchers have been working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced or supplemented with free-flying robotic bees in the form of micro unmanned aerial vehicles.
“This has been surprising to ecologists and biologists, and subsequently met with a degree of incredulity and ridicule from some in those fields.”
Then he got into why robobees are “ecologically problematic”.
The problems with robot bees
Dr Dorin said that a “back-of-the-envelope estimate using available statistics” suggests the world had approximately 16 trillion managed honeybees in 2016.
This had proved insufficient to meet the global need for agricultural pollination.
This calculation didn’t take in the trillions of wild honeybees. Nor the tens of thousands of other bee species, countless species of flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, wasps and other insects that are also important crop pollinators.
“In short, if insects do die off in large numbers, we’d need an uncomfortable number of robobees to replicate their pollination benefits,” he wrote.
Other issues
Costly: Only wealthy farms could afford robobees. He said that smallholder and subsistence farmers living in developing nations, who operate around 75 per cent of the world’s farms are unlikely to be able to afford robobee swarms.
Environmentally catastrophic: Robobees working in open fields and orchard crops are likely to “stray or become damaged, (and) unretrieved devices will litter and pollute the environment”.
Toxic lunch: Birds, reptiles and amphibians live on flying insects. Robobees that look like the real thing are likely to be consumed and cause choking or poisoning.
Hazard for pilots: Dr Dorin said that if ingested by crop-duster aircraft engines, robobees are even potentially hazardous to human pilots. Hard materials are likely to damage engine components, possibly causing catastrophic failure.
Bottomline: technology can help with this crisis, but saving the bees that buzz without batteries should be a priority.
