NewScientist (18 February 2017) reports on Plan B if the decline of the pollinating bee population continues:
Eijiro Miyako at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues have now built a drone that fulfils [the role of pollinating bees]. The manually controlled craft is 4 centimetres wide and has a mass of just 15 grams.
The drone’s underside is covered in horsehair coated in a sticky gel. Pollen grains that stick lightly to the gel when the drone visits one flower will get rubbed off on to the next flower visited. In experiments, the drone was able to cross-pollinate Japanese lilies (Chem, doi.org/bzk8).
Miyako says the team is now working on autonomous drones that could help pollinate crops. “We hope this will help to counter the problem of bee declines,” says Miyako. GPS, high-resolution cameras and artificial intelligence will be required for the drones to navigate independently between flowers and visit them correctly, although it will be some time before all that is in place.
I wonder if they’ve thought about problems from would-be predators, bad weather, even strong spider-webs. For that matter, does this constitute competition for the local bee population.
And, of course, this really must be a Plan B, to only be used in the case of disaster. Although it amuses me to think of the farmer organizing his fleet of bee-drones, deciding where to pollinate next. Although pollination is not necessarily a year around activity … on the other hand, the drones shouldn’t be all that expensive.
I note in the referenced academic paper the researchers also applied the gel directly to ants:
ILG [ionic liquid gels] droplets were prepared on the hips of F. japonica ants by photopolymerization in a manner almost similar to that used to make the hybrid flies. We carefully observed the pollen-collection behavior of these hybrid ants after releasing 30 specimens in a plastic container with three T. gesneriana flowers. The hybrid ants moved in the flowers, and large amounts of pollen grains became attached to their bodies as a result ( Figure 2D). The hybrid ants adsorbed more pollen grains on their bodies than did wild ants (Figures 2E and 2F; Movie S1). SEM imaging also revealed that the hybrid ants adsorbed more T. gesneriana pollen grains on the ILG droplets than did wild ants ( Figures 2G, S11, and S12). The adhesiveness and superwettability of the ILGs were particularly helpful in the effective collection of pollen grains from the flowers. Further, all hybrid ants (30) survived and did not exhibit any movement-related issues when placed in a container for 3 days or longer. In summary, these results indicate that the synthesized ILGs could be used as efficient pollen collectors with high biocompatibility for pollination using living insects.
It’s not clear to me if anointing numerous ants with this gel would be an efficient operation. But it might keep the farm kids busy.
But us casual gardeners?
