Must Read: Pollinator Drones: Scientist Prepares Dystopian Future!

Bees are dying at an alarming rate around the globe. Scientists fears that in the future, there will be no more bees to pollinate plants. But a team of researchers has found a way to help bees in its function in the environment.

From the report from the Intergovernmental Science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, since humans greatly rely on bees to pollinate plants, it is a widespread concern that bees are disappearing at an alarming rate. Many scientists are finding solutions to prevent the catastrophic event from happening.

According to Gizmodo, a team of scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan has engineered drones with an adhesive that can pick-up and deposit pollen. Drones like these might be able to help bees in their pollination efforts.

A chemist from AIST Eijiro Miyako started to conceptualize the artificial bee through a decade-old bottle of sticky gel from the past experiment. The group performed several tests with the gel by rubbing it onto ants and flies and having the bugs hang out around flowers. The result shows that each bug ended up covered with pollen grains.

Miyako's team were eager to do more test. They prepared a remote-controlled drone with animal hair covered with the goo and glued at the bottom of the drone. "It effectively picked up pollen grains by knocking into the flowers to pollinate" Eijiro Miyako said.

However, these artificial pollinators are not ready yet for the dystopian future. The research team used remote controls and the drone are only tested in one kind of flower. "It is not like the drone crawled inside, as would bees pollinate certain crops. They are still hard to control", said Miyako.

Moreover, in an article published in Inverse, a team of Harvard researchers is working on robotic bees to help fill in the role of the pollinators. In 2013, they demonstrated these RoboBees can really fly and hover. However, these artificial pollinators are still attached to a wire and an external power source.

Recently, the research team announced some advancement to their creation. RoboBees can now perch on objects from any angle using static energy. "We are still ways off from micro-drones that can actually pollinate flowers and to find power source small enough and light enough to let these bees go off", says Harvard engineer Kevin Ma.

The most important thing that bees do is to pollinate for millions of years. Pollination is needed for the plants to reproduce and grow fruits which are humans and most animals mainly consume.

If bee populations are rapidly decreasing around the world this is really a huge concern. There will be a mass collapse of vegetation and eventually extinction of the majority of life on Earth if these bees will vanish.