When Robots Do the Bees' Work: Pollination Goes Mechanical

Bees pollinate roughly a third of the crops we eat, and they are struggling. Habitat loss, pesticides and disease keep pushing wild pollinator populations down, while greenhouses, by design, keep insects out. The result is a strange bottleneck in modern agriculture: plenty of flowers, not enough pollination. In 2026, a growing fleet of robots is stepping into that gap.

Air pulses instead of wing beats

The clearest success story is in tomato greenhouses. Tomatoes are usually buzz-pollinated: a bumblebee grips the flower and vibrates until pollen shakes loose. Israeli company Arugga replicates that trick with Polly, an autonomous robot that rolls between greenhouse rows, spots open flowers with computer vision and fires calibrated air pulses at them. According to the company, around 60 robots were commercially deployed across Australia, Europe and North America by late 2025, with growers reporting yield gains of 2 to 5 percent over manual or bee-based pollination. Its second generation, Polly+, is reported to work twice as fast.

Outdoors, the approach changes scale. American startup Dropcopter flies drones that release pollen over almond, apple and cherry orchards. One person can hand-pollinate perhaps ten trees a day; a drone is reported to cover about 40 acres in four hours, and the technique has been used from California to Brazil.

Not a replacement for bees

Researchers are pushing further down in size. An MIT team has built insect-scale flying robots, flapping-wing machines lighter than a paperclip, that achieved flight roughly 100 times longer than previous designs, a step toward swarms that could someday pollinate vertical farms. A 2025 review in Artificial Intelligence Review catalogues air-jet, water-jet, ultrasonic and contact-based pollinators, each tuned to specific crops.

The honest caveat: none of this replaces bees. Robotic pollination works where insects cannot go, in sealed greenhouses and vertical farms, or where wild populations have already thinned. Ecologists warn against treating machines as a licence to neglect pollinator conservation. The smarter reading is complementary: robots secure food production in controlled environments, while the fields still depend, as they always have, on the real thing. The bee, it turns out, remains very hard engineering to beat.