Could Bubbles be the Future of Pollination?
Japanese scientists have successfully pollinated a pear orchard using bubbles!
Who needs bees when you have bubbles?
Scientists have worked to identify alternative pollinators for agriculture over the years, as concerns have mounted over dwindling insect populations. Researchers believe that robot bees or tiny drones might one day replace actual honey bees as pollinators if they die off. But if these robots are not ready in time, a group of Japanese researchers has shown that bubbles can be used to pollinate fruit tree flowers.
Scientists at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently announced that they successfully pollinated a pear orchard using soap bubbles. According to a recently released study published in iScience, researchers managed to deliver pollen grains to pear trees in the bubbles without damaging flowers.
“It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, in a press release. “In comparison with other types of remote pollination, functional soap bubbles have innovative potentiality and unique properties, such as effective and convenient delivery of pollen grains to targeted flowers and high flexibility to avoid damaging them.”
Pollinators play a big role in agriculture, as around 30 percent of food grown across the world depends on them. Miyako and his colleagues built a tiny drone pollinator in 2017, but struggled to figure out how to stop these robo bees from bumping into flowers and destroying them. Miyako came up with the answer one day in the park when a bubble landed on his son’s face.
The researchers loaded a solution which included pollen grains into a bubble gun and let it rip in their pear orchard. Each bubble contained around 2,000 pollen grains.
They then loaded up a GPS-controlled drone up with the bubble solution and tested it on fake lilies. They found that the bubbles were 90 percent successful in hitting their targeted flowers.
Researchers admit the limitations of the method, as bubbles won’t be effective when it’s raining or windy outside, but it could provide a low-tech complement to robot bees.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Could Bubbles be the Future of Pollination?
by Alex Robinson, Modern Farmer
June 20, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Crazy. Ineffective. Why not just use drone with brush?