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Sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them. — Carol Ann Duffy
Keep your eyes peeled, autonomous robotic bees may be coming to crop-fields near you. Measuring about half the length of a paper clip and weighing in at less than one-tenth of a gram, the insect-inspired microbots were developed by scientists at Wyss Institute to replace rapidly dwindling populations of bees, the world’s natural food crop pollinators.
While a global fleet of Robobees may sound pretty cool from a tech-wow perspective, when it comes to substituting pollinating machines for the real deal, researchers at the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research and Institute of Bee Health say not so fast. Before we roll out tiny red carpets to welcome substitute bees to the planet, according to an analysis published in Science of the Total Environment, we should consider a simpler, more holistic solution—protecting our natural pollinators and the landscapes they depend on for survival.
In the debate around bees versus Robobees, it turns out that replacing live bees with pollinating machines is not that straightforward. Bees have been honing their sophisticated sensory abilities and specialized pollination skills for over 130 million years in response to the unique shapes, scents, and colors of hundreds of thousands of flowering plants. While microbots may be capable of pollinating easy-access plants like sunflowers, the innate expertise of bees is hard to replicate across diverse crop species.
Not only are bees adaptable and super-skilled at their jobs, they also work for free, contributing between $235 to $577 billion to annual global food production. In contrast, robotic bees are pricey. At an estimated cost of $10 per microbot, replacing the billions of bees needed to pollinate crops with machine bees would run in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And unlike live bees, robotic bees need maintenance. Rather than creating a new machine-bee rental and repair industry, scientists argue that restoring pollinator habitats would be a far more cost-effective way to support food production. At a time when we are aiming to reduce our global carbon footprint, the environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing of fleets of robotic bees could be enormous.
And bees don’t go about their important business in isolation. They’re critical components of biodiversity, helping to maintain the balance of environmental systems that support life on Earth. Replacing diverse pollinators with a single microbot is a risky business. It’s not clear what impact swarms of machine bees may have on the delicate interdependent workings of nature. The adage when you fix one thing, be careful not to break something else comes to mind.
The idea that we can address environmental problems by replacing elements of the natural world with technology-based substitutes is not a new one. As the guardians of the planet, we have the ability to transform our relationship with nature and apply innovative, emerging technologies to map, monitor, protect, and restore rather than replace. Because beyond their much-appreciated bottom-line contributions to food security, bees are iconic and beloved members of the community of life and play an important role in human culture and well-being.
How components of nature are valued depends on who is doing the valuing. We treasure these industrious insects not just for their productivity but also for their poetry. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a pollen-flecked bumblebee drowse in a dahlia, we think you’ll agree that there are some things in life for which there are no substitutes. It’s just better with bees—tiny, perfect soul anchors for a world in flux.
