Robotic Bees the Solution to Colony Collapse?

The engineers at Harvard believe that they have a solution to the bee problem.

The decline of the honeybee population has something scientists have been struggling with for over a decade. There are many ideas on why the honeybees have been disappearing, some say it is insecticides, other scientists insist that it is a fungal infection killing them off. Whatever may be the official cause of over 50% (in some areas of the world) of the bee population to die off or disappear, we need to find a solution or risk losing the way we pollinate a large amount of the food we grow.

Engineers at Harvard have come up with a very interesting idea if one day the bees cease to exist. The idea is robotic bees that are no larger than a penny, that can be controlled to pollinate and perform other scientific duties. The robo-bees are a 12 year project that when done, will allow the robo-bees to pollinate, track weather patterns, search and rescue and other research duties.

Currently, the robots can only take flight for a max of ten minutes, but they are also in the very early stages of development.

This is certainly some outside of the box thinking by the engineers, but is it really a viable end game solution to stop the decline of the bee population? Or can we find out the actual reason in time to save our little flying friends that make all that delicious honey we love.

Check out the video from Harvard of the robo-bees below.

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