Why People Want to Replace Bees with Pollinating Drones

Robots are often the center of sci-fi films, questioning the balance of nature and ethics for better or worse. But at the heart of it, these are meant to be humanity's solution to problems that arise along with the modern world, to add or assist in human activities. While people make cases for jobs lost to the age of automation, it seems that the busy bee currently finds its own job on the line.

An integral part of the pollination process, bees have always performed well as a pollinator alongside hummingbirds and other species of birds and insects. But as the hardworking apian existence continues to decline in numbers, people are being called to preventive action. Slogans such as "Save the Bees" continues to pop up in climate change protests and environmental campaigns by organizations such as the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council and the Greenpeace movements.

These efforts range from calling for government reforms, tree-planting initiatives, and, yes, robot drones.

Researches on bee prototypes shows varying degrees of success.  Those themat were considered include works done by Senior Researcher Eijiro Miyako's and those of Industrial Design student Anna Haldewang, both of which look towards technology as alternative solutions to the problem of pollination. Miyako, for instance, bought a $100 drone and retrofitted it with horsehair bristles and a gel adhesive to mimic the way a bee's body helps in the pollination process. The results, however, are one of the bulkier and less cost-effective approaches to the race to build a better bee. Harvard's own Wyss Institute, on the other hand, is among those currently working on microbots to provide a sleeker and less obtrusive solution.

But what exactly is it about robots that could make for a more attractive substitute to nature's age-old pollinators?

The answer, it turns out, lies in the shape of a bee's eye.

Putting the bee's conservation status aside, bees are hard to beat as the world's best pollinators. Whenever a bee collects pollen from a flower, the hairs on the bees' body attract the pollen grains and the stiff hair on their legs makes it easy for them to carry the pollen from flower to hive. Because the bee spends most of its life collecting pollen, these humble insects are one of the world's best resource for cross-pollination.

But despite the way their bodies have evolved for the role, there is one caveat that leaves it with room for improvement: bees see the world differently. In The Feynman Lectures on Physics, renowned physicist Richard Feynman described how acutely bees could see color differences imperceptible to humans, helping them see into ultraviolet and differentiate between flowers that might look identical to the human eye.

In fact, flowers are known to evolve to display colors that make them more attractive to bees. In a study comparing the frequency of visitation of bees among different colors of flowers, it was observed that bees find the color white uninteresting because white flowers absorb ultraviolet rather than completely reflect it back. Another color that shares an interesting relationship with bees is the color red; bees cannot see the color red. While most of these flowers appear bluish to the bee, some species of red flowers appear black to the busy insect, and so are ignored by bees for being difficult to tell apart from shadows.

This is where robot drones come into play.

While other natural pollinators such as hummingbirds do swoop in and do the bees' job in cases such as these, drones have the potential of tending to plants with indiscriminate attention and without disrupting the existing ecosystem.

The only question, then, is who would be able to make the technology available first.

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