Somehow, startup companies have heard about my idea for robotic bees. (This is a Wall Street Journal article, which I don’t subscribe to, but I can get the idea from the first couple paragraphs. Sorry guys, I can’t afford to subscribe to anything, and if I have to pick one thing it will probably be to support my local paper. Except, if I lived in New York, it would not be the New York Times because weapons of mass destruction.) More likely, it’s a fairly obvious idea. And probably a good idea, if the pollinators really are disappearing worldwide. Then again, it’s a partial technological solution to replace a lost ecosystem service. Trucking around hives of domesticated honeybees to replace or supplement natural pollinators in farm fields is already a technological solution, if you think about it. Important questions: Do they sting? (I hope the answer is an obvious no.) Are we going to release clouds of robot pollinators into natural ecosystems? Probably not, this seems focused on agriculture. Are they going to be solar powered? It seems like it would be safer to have them return to a charging station, or else drop dead if their batteries run out.

This also brings up all the usual questions about valuing ecosystem services. Pollination is absolutely essential to life on earth, so pollinators are incredibly valuable in an economic sense. If we replace them with technology, does their value drop? In an economic sense, yes. In a moral sense, I would say no, at least to me.