Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat
an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you’re partaking of an ancient
relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide
bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the
proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies.
But never worry,
those real life pollinators—the birds and the bees, as they say—may soon be
irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are
developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium
and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops. These
robots or drones can fly and are designed to be small enough to pollinate a
flower. With a weigh of 80 milligrams they can hover, giving them plenty of
time to transfer pollen. Their wing mimic those of a fly, flapping when pulled
by a special ceramic that contracts when stimulated by electricity. This
enables the robo-bees to flap 100 times a second, fast enough to float in the
air, as a regular bee would.
The robo-bees aren´t
ready for prime time yet. Because they´re so tiny, they can´t fit a battery
pack for power. The bees will also need some sort of computer control so they
can guide themselves in flight. And above we will need to mimic the natural
behaviour of the beehive. The nature took millions of years to produce and
develop the amazing bees as native pollinators but it seems that in a few
decades we humans may well transform and give a new meaning to pollination by
creating a new order of drones.
Above by Russ McSpadden
Monolithic fabrication of millimeter-scale machines
P S Sreetharan, J P Whitney,
M D Strauss and R JWood
J. Micromech.
Microeng. 22 (2012) 055027
(6pp)