Silicon Updates: Plan Bee to replace Bees with Drones for artificial pollination

We get honey from bees; we know that. Bees are responsible for pollination of flowers; we know that, too. Over a past decade, there is an alarming falling rate of number of bees across the globe; we know this too, but we don’t care about it! If the number of bees continue to fall in the same rate, flowers cannot pollinate naturally. This ultimately results in global environmental hazards.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Plan Bee

Eijiro Miyako from Japan came up with an idea to use drone for cross pollination. Eijiro is a chemist at Nanomaterials Research Institute of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Statistics of Honey Bee declining population in USA

These Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is equipped with a sticky gel and horsehair that allow it to collect the pollen grains from a flower and drop it onto another flower, allowing cross pollination. Eijiro has developed these drones from a toy drone available on Amazon and he has been successful in implementation of artificial pollination. Eijiro wants to expand the scope of these pollinating drones with the help of AI and GPS put together. However, this is an idea he is working on.

Plan Bee:

After being inspired by the documentary Vanishing of the Bees, Anna Haldewang has opted to work on this subject for her school industrial project. After this, she has worked on artificial pollination and came up with similar concept of Eijiro’s for pollination.

The Plan Bee is to create a fleet of drones that support pollination, replacing honey bees. People working on Project Plan Bee has estimated that an army of three trillion pollinating drones are required in order to replace honey bees completely.

Colony Collapse Disorder:

Dave Goulson of University of Sussex has been studying about the bees and their existence from past 25 years. He says that the major cause of declining honey bee population is that bees being poisoned.

You’ve got bees that are hungry, infected with foreign diseases and are being poisoned all at the same time. It’s not really surprising that sometimes they die. It’s the combination of stresses that’s killing them. - Goulson.

Kenneth Beyoce, a beekeeper from Central New York has stated that Varroa mite, a parasite with its origin in Asia has caused Colony collapse disorder in bees.

There are many ways technology is helping humans. This is one of the best examples to say technology-at-its-best. Hope the technology helps continue the greenery all over again. 

The Plan Bee prototype by Anna Haldewang