Robot bees as plan B against bee mortality

Robot bees – this is reminiscent of the dystopian British science fiction series “Black Mirror”. In the episode Hated in the Nation (2016), bee-like minidrones have replaced the extinct bees to keep crops pollinated. A criminal hacks the drones to kill people. A rather haunting scenario.

In reality, scientists have been working for quite some time on various projects in which to develop robot bees. The technical solution serves as a kind of plan B in case the death of bees – or insects in general – cannot be stopped.

The importance of bees and other insects is demonstrated by the simple fact that about a third of the food we eat depends on pollinators. According to a 2011 study, about 88 percent of the world’s flowering plants are pollinated by animals. A single bee can pollinate up to 100 flowers a day, and an entire colony together can produce several million.

One of the most advanced projects is the so-called RoboBee, which is being developed by researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. This robotic bee, which is half the size of a paper clip and weighs about 90 milligrams, has intelligent sensors. These mimic the function of the bees’ eyes and antennae, allowing the tiny device to sense and respond to its environment.

During flight, the RoboBee is powered by artificial muscles. These are made of materials that contract when tension is applied. The microdrones must one day be able to fly independently and work together as a unit in swarms.

Another project is TU Delft’s DelFly Nimble, which weighs just under 30 grams and has a wingspan of 33 centimetres. This makes it significantly larger than the RoboBee. The Dutch Brummer has four wings with which it can fly in all directions. It also has an on-board computer and sensors. It can carry a four-ounce load, like a camera. The DelFly Nimble is actually being used to study insect flight, but the developers see other uses for it in the future. For example, it could pollinate plants in a greenhouse.

A new project called RoboRoyale, which also takes a different approach, is being developed by a research team led by Farshad Arvin, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. It differs from other projects in that it focuses on the queen bee and not the entire colony: the researchers are working on a system of robotic bees that should influence the behavior of the queen bee in the hive.

“We want to influence the whole ecosystem by interacting with just one animal, the queen,” says Arvin. “For example, if we can ensure that activities such as egg laying take place at the right time, we will have healthier offspring and more active, healthier bee colonies. This will in turn improve pollination.”

The tiny robots – replicas of the so-called court bees that normally interact with the queen bee – are designed to help the queen lay as many eggs as possible, for example by giving her the right protein-rich food at the right time. In addition, the queen should produce more pheromones. These odor hormones control the entire bee colony.

The RoboRoyale system consists of six to eight robotic bees, some of which are equipped with a small camera. They are controlled in an observation box by a controller attached to them from the outside. Over time, the robot bees should then become fully autonomous and the system would have to use machine learning to figure out how best to do its job.

To fine-tune the robot bees, cameras observed queen bees from different hives to gain insight into their behavior. More than 150 million flight movements of the queens in the hive have been recorded. In addition, detailed images can be captured of their social interactions with other bees. The system has so far been tested in Austria and Turkey in artificial glass beehives. The robot bees will soon fly completely autonomously.

However, the combination of robotics and nature also has a downside. For example, bees are sensitive to foreign objects in their hive – they will try to remove it or pack it with wax. It is therefore not easy to label the robot bees, as they must resemble real bees as much as possible.

Nevertheless, the scientists assume that robotics and artificial intelligence will play a key role in the long-term conservation of ecosystems. The fact that it is possible to get closer to animals and plants in this way and to investigate previously unknown interactions between plants, animals and the environment can only contribute to this.

There are no robot bees yet that could take over the function of insects as pollinators in the environment. One of the main issues their developers struggle with is reach. If the microdrones get their energy from a battery, it must not be too large, otherwise they will become too heavy. The RoboBee, which uses solar cells, only flies in bright light and is still unsuitable for flight in nature.

However, if artificial bees were flying around as pollinators one day, it would probably cause new problems. One could be the waste left in nature when such robotic bees are lost. After all, unlike their natural counterparts, they are not made of organic material that decays quickly. And then the question immediately arises whether this technology cannot be misused. Depending on the model, robot bees are equipped with GPS, intelligent sensors, processing chips or cameras. So there is a real danger that they can be hacked and reprogrammed, as the episode “Black Mirror” shows.