Slashdot Mirror
Can We Pollinate Flowers With Tiny Flying Drones? (economist.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
An engineer in Japan has built a 1.6-inch "pollinator-bot" and successfully tested it in his lab. The drone's creator "has armed it with paintbrush hairs that are covered in a special gel sticky enough to pick pollen up, but not so sticky that it holds on to that pollen when it brushes up against something else," reports The Economist. They write that his experiments with the tiny drone "show that the drone can indeed carry pollen from flower to flower in the way an insect would -- though he has yet to confirm that seeds result from this pollination." While flown by a human pilot, next he hopes to equip the drones with their own flower-recognizing technology.
The Christian Science Monitor followed up with four experts, asking "Could a fleet of robo-pollinators replace, or at least supplement, the bees?" One said "There is no substitute for bees." Another pointed out that even if robo-bees are developed, some flowers will prove harder to pollinate than others. A third expert thought the technology could scale, though it would need to be mass-produced, and the engineers would need to develop a reusable pollen-collecting gel. But a fourth expert remained worried that it just couldn't scale without becoming too expensive. "I'm not sure that's going to be cheap enough to not make blueberries hundreds of dollars a pint."
Three of those experts also agreed that the best solution is just wild bees, because domesticated or not, "All they have to do is make sure to set aside enough land conducive to the bees' habitat."
The Christian Science Monitor followed up with four experts, asking "Could a fleet of robo-pollinators replace, or at least supplement, the bees?" One said "There is no substitute for bees." Another pointed out that even if robo-bees are developed, some flowers will prove harder to pollinate than others. A third expert thought the technology could scale, though it would need to be mass-produced, and the engineers would need to develop a reusable pollen-collecting gel. But a fourth expert remained worried that it just couldn't scale without becoming too expensive. "I'm not sure that's going to be cheap enough to not make blueberries hundreds of dollars a pint."
Three of those experts also agreed that the best solution is just wild bees, because domesticated or not, "All they have to do is make sure to set aside enough land conducive to the bees' habitat."
Apparently after getting a laughing face for a president (orange instead of blue), more Black Mirror episodes are coming true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation_(Black_Mirror)
Sure would take a lot of drones. It might be easier to genetically engineer the bees to have genes to resist whatever is killing them - insecticide or parasites - by splicing in genes from bee species that are resistant but suboptimal for pollination. Bees are basically self replicating drones that can refuel and rebuild themselves from products supplied by the very flowers they are pollinating.
But worst case scenario - if the bees all become extinct - we could use drones instead.
This is about the third or forth slashdot story I've seen that was covered in a "Black Mirror" episode. Now I am really worried about the one with the politician and the pig ...
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Wait -- that sounds exactly like bees. How about we promote the bees, rather than replace them with robots?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Bots do it... drones do it ...
Even educated phones do it!
Let's do it
“Every year, in late winter or early spring, some 3,000 trucks drive across the United States carrying around 40 billion bees to California’s Central Valley, which houses more than 60 million almond trees... Californian growers now spend $250 million a year on bees”.
"Farmageddon", Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott, p 63.
Californian growers do not spend that money for fun. They do it because otherwise they will have no crop. Good luck producing 40 billion tiny artificial bees. (Although if the idea goes forward I would buy shares in the manufacturer - just as you will notice that there has never been a massive government IT project that Oracle didn't love).
A simpler and more practical idea would be to stop killing off the bees, which do a great job entirely free of charge.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Considering we're supposed to be the smartest animal on the planet you'd think we would have learned by now.
A few individuals - a very few - are intelligent, and of those some are creatively intelligent. The species homo sapiens is not intelligent. How can you argue otherwise, when other social animals such as wasps, ants, bees and termites have thriven for over 100 million years, whereas we have existed as a distinct species for maybe 2 million years and in our present, grotesquely mutated, "civilized" form for 10,000 years - and we are on the very brink of self-extermination?
There is no call for anything drastic or spectacular like thermonuclear war. All it will take is another century of "progress".
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”'
- Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. A. Heinlein
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Can We Pollinate Flowers With Tiny Flying Drones?
Probably yes, but why not just spend the money on fixing colony collapse disorder? It seems much more efficient to just breed bees that are resistant to the varroa mite and the various viruses causing CCD and cutting down on pesticide use. If necessary it must be possible to introduce genes from resistant species of bees into vulnerable bee species elsewhere.
These drones would not replace bees. Bees pollinate randomly, and that can be a problem when you need targeted pollination to produce hybrid seeds. Hybrid seeds are often expensive because hand pollination is used. These drones could automate that, and may be cheap enough that individual farmers could produce their own hybrids.
Anyway, the engineer who said, that in order to scale, these may have to be mass-produced, certainly has an incisive intellect. That guy should be promoted immediately, since nothing is more important than a firm grip on the obvious.
These drones could prove useful in hydroponic and other greenhouse-based agriculture where bees are generally not present. The current solutions mostly involve humans walking around with either paintbrushes (for plants which cross-pollinate, like cucumbers) or portable blowers (for plants with flowers that self-pollinate, like tomatoes).
#DeleteChrome
Perhaps we should just bring in some cheap H1-Bees to take care of the pollination problem.
Here locally a lot of medium sized beekeepers serving the factory farms have had ongoing problems, not just monoculture but generally with their very new formulas for winter feeding. This is true even for beekeepers in mostly organic areas, which we have a lot of around here.
So the price of formerly-cheap honey did go up significantly, and the big farms had trouble contracting with beekeepers.
But farmers who keep their own bees, and beekeepers using traditional formulas and leaving the bees a percent of their own honey for the winter, they're not really having any more problems than usual. Everybody loses a few bee colonies now and then, but all the smaller brands at the health food stores have had stable supply and prices. Urban beekeepers have also continued to be successful.
Anywhere I go in nature during the spring I see lots of wild bee activity from a variety of species.