As bee populations dwindle, drone pollinators’ use studied

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scienti sts in Japan say they ’ve managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.

The system, desc ribed i n t h e j o u r n a l C h e m, i s nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to devel opi ng aut o - mat e d p o l l i n a t i o n t e c h - niques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines.

In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom’s female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other. Those third players are animals known as pollinators — a diverse group of critters that includes bees, butterflies, birds and bats, among others.

Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90 percent of flowering plants and one-third of human food crops, according to the U.S. Department o f Ag r i c u l t u r e ’s Nat u r a l Re s ourc e s C onser v a t i on Service. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades, likely due to a combination of factors, including agricultural chemicals, invasive species and climate change.

Just last month, the rusty patched bumblebee became the first wild bee in the United States to be listed as an endangered species, although the Trump administration put a halt on that designation.