Mini drones sporting horsehair coated in a sticky gel could one day take the pressure off beleaguered bee populations by transporting pollen from plant to plant, researchers said. Roughly three-quarters of the world's flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world's food crops depend on animals to pollinate them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of nature's most prolific pollinators are bees, but bee populations are declining around the world, and last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a native species as endangered for the first time. Now, researchers from Japan said they've taken the first steps toward creating robots that could help pick up the slack from insect pollinators. The scientists created a sticky gel that lets a $100 matchbox-size drone pick up pollen from one flower and deposit it onto another to help the plants reproduce.

The result is a large robotic pollinator described in the journal Chem. In addition to putting together the remote-controlled pollinating drone, Miyako and colleagues also tested the gel on ants, and found that ants with a small coating of the gel attracted more pollen than ants without. Miyako's experiment was inspired by the plight of pollinators like bees around the globe, many of which are currently imperiled by a wide variety of factors. Dave Goulson, a biologist who specializes in the study of bumblebees, says that a combination of factors are leading to the declining health of bee populations worldwide. "The poor bees are short of food, poisoned by pesticides and infected with foreign diseases. There are a few other minor things as well, but you stick all that together and it's hardly surprising that they're not doing so great," Goulson says.