As the rapid advancement of CCD began to reach feverish levels in June of this year, President Obama created a task force charged with solving the mystery within 180 days. The response from America’s brightest minds was swift and penetrating.
Harvard University scientists have come up with a deceptively simple solution that could also provide a potential boon for the nation’s growing drone industry: Replace the dead bees with micro-aerial vehicles that pollinate on command—robo-bees. It’s a gamble, but in these disruptive times, even nature needs to innovate if it wants to stay relevant.
Like “a mechanical flash mob,” as one journalist put it, the robo-bees are able to efficiently function within a swarm of thousands and self-assemble into a variety of shapes, including letters, numbers and even a five pointed star.
But it’s not just anthophila that are dying en masse. Neonic pesticides have also been linked to a more general decline in insect populations across the map, which has created a schism in nature’s managerial structure — fewer insects means less food for birds, which means fewer birds and so on and so forth.
From an engineering perspective, birds present a more complex challenge. One area where their robotic analogs could be of use is to replace a bird’s traditional function of spreading seeds from the various plant life it consumes.