Bee-Like Drones Can Use Bubble Machines to Pollinate Flowers

You have no doubt heard that bees are dying off, and that that is something you should be worried about. Not many people are concerned about bees for the same reason they’re worried about cuddly polar bears, but rather because bees are integral to food production. It’s all about self-preservation. Greenpeace reports that US National Agricultural Statistics showed a 60 percent reduction in the number of honey bee hives from 1947 to 2008. About a third of your food can be attributed to honey bee pollination, so that’s a big deal. To help replace those bees, researchers have equipped a drone with a bubble maker capable of pollinating flowers.

This research was conducted at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) with the simple goal of providing a practical means of artificial pollination. A lot of researchers around the world have been working on this problem for years and some of them have achieved limited success. But robotic pollinators haven’t exactly been practical. They have to make direct contact with flowers, which is very inefficient and often results in damage to the flower. This solution solves both problems, and seems almost obvious in retrospect: just shoot pollen laden bubbles at the flowers.

If you’ve been to a kid’s birthday party, then you already know how easy it is to make soap bubbles. The researchers developed a special solution to carry pollen in those bubbles, which was formulated specifically for successful pollination. They then put that solution into a bubble machine strapped to the bottom of a standard hexacopter drone. That drone can fly over flowers at a speed of two meters per second and a height of two meters, and still achieve a pollination success rate of 90 percent. The bubbles don’t target flowers in any way, but that’s hardly necessary when you’re flooding a field with thousands of bubbles per second. Some more work is needed to make the bubble solution more eco-friendly, but this pollination technique looks like a very promising way to compensate for the declining bee populations.