Crop-Improving Pollination Devices Inspired by Bees

A bee hovers just above a flower, with its wings rapidly beating

Innovation

BloomX

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Attach Temporarily

Living systems must sometimes, temporarily, stay in one place, climb or otherwise move around, or hold things together. This entails attaching temporarily with the ability to release, which minimizes energy and material use. Some living systems repeatedly attach, detach, and reattach for an extended time, such as over their lifetimes. Despite being temporary, these attachments must withstand physical and other forces until they have achieved their purpose. Therefore, living systems have adapted attachment mechanisms optimized for the amount of time or number of times they must be used. An example is the gecko, which climbs walls by attaching its toes for less than a second. Other examples include insects that attach their eggs to a leaf until they hatch, and insects whose wings temporarily attach during flight but separate after landing.

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Solids

Some living systems must secure solid particles such as sediment, usually to keep the particles from hindering their health or activity. The most common way in which they do this is through filtering. To be effective, a filtering system must be appropriate to the sizes of solid particles to be captured and must capture only what is needed. It must also be effective in the appropriate media–air, water, or sometimes solids like soil. An example is mangroves, which are trees that grow along ocean coasts. Their root system slows down and settles sediment out of the water, building up soil to support the mangrove ecosystem.

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Pollinate

One of the ways that plants can produce offspring is by making seeds that contain the genetic information to produce a new plant. Seeds can only be produced when pollen grains reach the hidden ovaries within a flower. Flowers have developed wildly diverse forms and activities, such as the production of sweet nectar to attract organisms such as bees and butterflies, that move from flower to flower, transferring pollen. Flowers will also adapt to make use of environmental influences such as wind and water as pollinators.

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BloomX’s Robee and Crossbee mimic the different pollination effects of wild bees, reducing reliance on declining pollinator populations and increasing crop yields and fruit size.

Benefits

Higher crop yields
Larger fruits
Less dependence on declining pollinators

Applications

Agriculture

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 2: Zero Hunger
Goal 12: Responsible Production & Consumption
Goal 13: Climate Action

The Challenge

The vast majority of the world’s food crops rely on pollinators of one kind or another.

Local wild pollinators still perform this function in some contexts, but modern farming techniques have largely broken this system. Chemical herbicides and pesticides have removed many pollinators and the wild plant species they rely on from agricultural lands. Additionally, the vastness of many single-crop plantings isolate much of their area from the practical range of wild pollinator populations nearby.

For these reasons and others, most farms today rely on managed western honeybee populations for pollination. This species’ adaptability to different climatic conditions and flower types as well as their nesting habits make them easy to control and deploy wherever and whenever they are needed. Managed honeybee colonies can have a detrimental effect though, outcompeting native pollinators, and spreading diseases. And like other insect pollinators, they also face serious threats from pesticides and disease.

Furthermore, there are some crops that western honeybees simply aren’t very good at pollinating.

Biological Model

Different kinds of bees have different ways of collecting pollen, and in some cases, those strategies have evolved to more efficiently pollinate certain types of flowers. Some bees (such as bumble bees) can use buzz pollination: without moving their wings, they vibrate their flight muscles to shake pollen loose. This is especially beneficial for plants such as blueberries, whose flowers release their pollen through tiny pores, like salt through a saltshaker.

Much pollination is also helped along by static electricity. When bees fly, they accumulate a positive charge. Then, when they land on a negatively charged flower, their positive charge causes the pollen to jump and cling to their tiny hairs.

See Related Strategy

Biological Strategy

Bees and Flowers Harness Static Electricity to Spread Pollen

Bees

Various structures build or concentrate charge to efficiently move pollen from flowers to bees (and back).

Innovation Details

BloomX has developed a buzz pollinating device for blueberry bushes and an electrostatic pollinating device for avocado orchards that they couple with an algorithm that uses environmental data to predict the best time to pollinate crops each day.

Western honeybees aren’t very efficient at pollinating either plant—blueberries, because they can’t engage in buzz pollination, and avocados, because they generally prefer other flowers that bloom at the same time. These crop-specific pollinating devices lead to higher rates of pollination, meaning higher yields and bigger fruits for farmers and the people they feed.

Robee, the buzz pollinator, looks somewhat like a large lawnmower. It’s battery-powered and has a vibrating arm on each side to gently shake pollen loose. Crossbee, the electrostatic pollinating device, looks like a tractor with broom handles protruding from the sides, and a series of serving trays attached to each broom handle. The “serving tray” is actually an electrostatically charged plate that attracts pollen from one avocado flower and deposits it on another.

Video: New Pollination Devices Inspired by Bees Increase Crop Yield

The Human Factor

For BloomX founder Thai Sade, agriculture was a part of daily life from a young age. In college, where he studied sustainability, he became preoccupied with the issue of food security. He wanted to contribute to improving the efficiency of food production but wasn’t sure how. After learning about the effects of low pollination rates and of researchers’ attempts to create bionic bees to help fill in, he found his niche. The solution, he realized, did not require the pollination device to look like a bee––but to function like one.

Ray of Hope Accelerator

The Ray of Hope Accelerator supports an annual cohort of ten high-impact nature-inspired startups representing various sectors and regions addressing the world’s biggest environmental and sustainability challenges. The accelerator builds upon years of experience as the Ray of Hope Prize. Created in honor of Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. and a business and sustainability leader, the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize (2020-2023) shone a light on the innovative, nature-inspired solutions that we need to build a sustainable and resilient world. BloomX was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Ray of Hope Prize.

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