News > Drones carrying soap bubbles may help pollinate flowers where bees cannot

Drones carrying soap bubbles may help pollinate flowers where bees cannot

Researchers combined an automatic bubble maker that blew 5,000 bubbles per minute with a GPS-controlled drone to create the robotic pollinator. Subsequent studies by authors found that when they used a toy bubble gun to blow pollen-laden bubbles on flowers in three trees, it showed that the resulting fruit was just as good as that of flowers that had been pollinated by hand.

The decline in active bee populations in the past decade has prompted researchers to look at different ways of achieving pollination.