Soap bubbles covered in pollen could help fertilise flowers

Soap bubbles that deliver pollen to flowers could offer an alternative way of fertilising plants as bee populations decline, while being more delicate than other methods. Eijiro Miyako at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his colleagues developed the technique and successfully used it to pollinate a pear orchard. "I jumped for joy," he says. Miyako and his team mixed pear pollen grains with a soap solution containing nutrients and loaded the mixture into a bubble gun. They then used the gun to release bubbles into a pear orchard, with about two to 10 bubbles hitting each flower, and later measured their success rate by counting the flowers that bore fruit.