The Bumblebee and Robo-Snake on Mars – The Facts

24 October 2013

There’s a plan to colonize Mars.  Applications are now being accepted from would-be volunteers.  From these, four colonists will be chosen for a one way trip to the red planet.  No, this isn’t a NASA Project.  The project belongs to a Dutch company, “Mars One.”  So, when are the colonists scheduled to leave?  About 20 years from now.  

When you consider that the estimated cost will be 6 billion dollars, you wonder how “Mars One” is planning to finance the project?   With a reality TV show.  But there’s yet another twist to the financing.  The 6 billion dollars will be raised by selling sponsorship/advertising for a reality TV show.  The show will be televised from Mars and star the four “lucky” colonists who “won” their one-way ticket to the red planet.

Who would want to go on a one-way trip to Mars — 20 years from now?  Surprisingly, a lot of people — about 100,000 applicants, to date, have paid the $38 dollar application fee – each hoping (1) to pass the fitness screening required to be eligible to make the trip and (2) to win the final selection lottery and be one of the four “lucky” colonists.  I’d like to call this “a plan,” but I’m not holding my breath.  It would take something more before I’d take a Martian colonial adventure seriously. [1]

But, then, “something more” happened.   Bumble bees and Wheeko, a robotic snake, volunteered for a mission to Mars.  This was a game-changer.  I knew these were real contenders for a successful colonial mission.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Bumbles and Robo-snake were being seriously considered by NASA and the ESA, respectively, rather than “Mars One.”  It also didn’t hurt that both Bumbles and Robo-snake are uniquely fitted to be Martian colonists.

In fact, a study published in Gravitational and Space Biology has demonstrated that bumblebees have “the right stuff.” [image] These, rather rotund, wild bees forage for food in the same wild grass and brush in which they build their nests.  I’m sure that, at first, no one saw them as particularly obvious candidates for a trip to Mars.  But, then, NASA identified an atmospheric pressure of 52 kilopascals (kPa) as “the ideal” for extraterrestrial facilities.  That’s a rather low pressure compared to earth’s normal sea level pressure of 101 kPa.  The search was on for fit space travelers and Martian colonists.  And “Bumbles” made the cut, and then some. [2]

While the bumble bee’s cousin, the familiar hive-dwelling honeybee, not only stopped working, but completely lost the ability to fly at an atmospheric pressure of 66.5 kPa, the bumble bee not only thrived at the lower 52 kPa atmospheric pressure, but continued its work, pollinating plants and collecting honey, at its usual pace. 

When the pressure was dropped below 50 kPa, “Bumbles” continued to work, but at a slower pace.   Then, when the pressure was dropped to 30 kPa, the bumble bees lost their ability to fly but, with an amazing display of mettle, these bees kept on working — foraging, pollinating, and gathering honey, more or less, on foot – crawling from bloom to bloom.  I think this the kind of bee we need to conquer the Final Frontier. [3]

Robo-Snake, on the other hand, has the obvious advantage of being a robot.  [image] So, those conditions necessary for the survival of a biological organism are of little importance to this candidate.  However, Robo-Snake is an odd contender, because he is being considered . . . before he exists.

Although the ESA (European Space Agency) is, more or less, including Robo-Snake as a crew member on an upcoming mission to Mars, this particular robotic crew member has not been developed yet.  It’s a little strange.  But, on second thought, is recruiting a nonexistent crew member to go on a real mission to Mars any stranger than "Mars One" recruiting real crew members to go on a nonexistent mission to Mars? [4]

No matter, Robo-Snake’s older brother is standing-in for his sibling in futuro during the evaluation process. Big brother (named "Wheeko") is a robotic snake that looks and moves surprisingly like a real snake.  It’s modus operandi is beyond a brief and simple description, but one video is worth a 1,000 words. [video]   

Wheeko, is composed of ten round metal balls, on the balls are rows of what appear to be smaller balls that roll with motive power and make Wheeko move.  With a camera on its “head,” (which is the lead ball), it makes the familiar serpentine movement of its namesake as it travels on the ground.

Wheeko is the subject of a current feasibility study by researchers at the SINTEF Research Institute in Norway and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  Until now, the primary purpose of the development of a robotic snake was as a tool to be used on search and rescue missions.  As one of the project members, Aksel Transeth, explained, real snakes “can climb rocks and slide through small holes.”  It is hoped that a robot with these skills could be used “to find people in a fallen buildings.”

If Wheeko passes all the tests, what will its little brother, the future Martian colonist, be like?  Actually, little brother will be different if for no other reason than he has a sidekick.  Or, more accurately, he will be a sidekick.  But, instead of playing sidekick to his fellow bumblebee colonists, Robo-Snake will play sidekick to the more familiar Mars Rover.  These vehicles are designed for off-roading in the rough Martian terrain.  Yet, however carefully they are directed, they do have a tendency to get stuck.  

Enter Robo-Snake. [image]

Not a lone player on the Martian surface, Robo-Snake would be a deployable snake robot or an actual arm attached to the Mars Rover.  The Rover vehicle could detach Robo-Snake to investigate the nooks and crannies of the terrain while allowing the Rover to maintain a safe distance from areas in which the Rover might get stuck.  And if the Rover gets stuck, one proposed design would turn Robo-Snake into something like the Rover’s tentacle arm.  Such an amazingly versatile arm would be able to both push and pull to extricate the Rover if caught in too tight a spot.

So, together, the bumble bees and the Robo-Snake may be the first Martian colonists.  Of course, they won’t be traveling together.  NASA is interested in “Bumbles” and the ESA is interested in Robo-Snake.   But even if they don’t share the same flight to the red planet, they’ll probably meet when they get there.  Right now, Mars isn’t that crowded. 

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

14 October 2013

About the Author

The Bumblebee — The Possible Return of the Hive-less Bee

29 August 2013

In the summer of 2012, bee enthusiast Megan O’Donald encountered a bumblebee in her mother’s garden in Briar, Washington.  In the distant past, this would have hardly been noteworthy, but after the disappearance of bumblebees from Washington state, almost ten years ago, the sighting was an event. [1]  In 2013, O’Donald saw another bumblebee in a goldenrod in the same garden.

When Will Peterman, a freelance writer and photographer, heard about O’Donald’s sightings, he decided to “launch an expedition.”  He identified several “patches of habitat” in small parks and unmown lots.  Investigation of the first three sites yielded nothing but, at the fourth, he struck gold. [2]

In Briar, Washington‘s Briar Park, he found and photographed several bumblebees.  Several days later, Peterman returned to the park with a group of bee experts (entomologists) and, together, they located and photographed several bumblebee queens.

It is estimated that the United States has lost almost half of its honeybee population in just the last seven years.  However, the many species of the relatively petite honeybee differ in appearance, behavior, and habitat from that group of species called bumblebees.

The relatively large and, somewhat, rotund bumblebee has also suffered a substantial disappearance in North America.  Not long ago, the bumblebee was common throughout the Western United States and Canada.  However, beginning in the late 1990’s, its numbers declined until it all but vanished from a vast area of its range extending from the Pacific Coast of California north into British Columbia.  Mysteriously, bumblebee populations remained relatively unaffected in the mountainous portions of this same range.

Unlike honeybees, bumbles are wild bees.  They are not kept by beekeepers.  However, their wild status makes them no less important to the agricultural industry.  These bees are specially suited to pollinate a variety of cash crops including tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums and their unique style of pollination accounts for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year.

Bumblebees are known for their characteristically loud buzz.  However, unlike hive-dwelling honeybees, bumblebees don’t just buzz when they’re flying.  They can, and do, produce that same buzz without moving their wings.  And it is just the vibration from this flightless buzz that makes them uniquely valuable pollinators of certain crops.

After landing in a blossom, the large bumblebee grabs the blossom and holds it tightly.  While maintaining this tight grip, it strongly vibrates while remaining stationary.  Nothing less than the bumblebee’s strong vibration will assure pollination by shaking loose sufficient quantities of the thick pollen produced by certain species of plants.  No other bee could do this job as consistently or successfully.

While the sighting of a few bumblebees in Washington state may not seem like much, Biologist Rich Hatfield, of the Xerces Society, believes that these few sightings hold the promise of a possible bumblebee repopulation of the their abandoned Western Range. [3]

Also, these sightings came at a time when bee watchers needed some good news.  Just a few weeks earlier, 50,000 bumblebees died, in mass, in an Oregon parking lot.  The cause of the die-off remains unexplained.  Even worse, these deaths came only one week before the beginning of the newly declared “National Pollinator Week.”

The challenges to bumblebee survival grow out of its peculiar lifestyle.  Unlike the petite honeybee, the bumblebee doesn’t maintain the familiar hive.  Bumble queens locate their 12-inch wide nests rather opportunistically, in “clumps of dry grass, old bird nests, abandoned rodent burrows, old mattresses, car cushions or even in or under old abandoned buildings.” [4]  Each bumblebee nest will be used for only a single year.  And a colony will begin and end within that same year’s time.  Each year, a new nest will be built and a new colony developed in a different location.  Most colonies number only a few hundred bees, though rarely, numbers can reach as high as 2,000.

The wild bumble’s nomadic lifestyle disburses its population.  This works to their advantage by protecting them from the rapid, plague-like spread of diseases so common in the perennial and densely populated hives of the honeybee.  Also, the freestyle foraging of this wild bee limits its exposure to systematically applied pesticides.  Bumbles certainly suffer some collateral damage from pesticides and are vulnerable to certain diseases.  However, pesticides and disease, the “usual suspects” in the disappearance of the honeybee, are less prominent contributors to the decline in bumble populations.

Inspired by the honeybee colonies, human attempts to create similar domesticated bumble colonies led to one of the few documented disease outbreaks among these bees.  When a few of the experimental, domesticated queens were imported from Europe to American, they brought with them a new fungal disease, which spread among some American bumblebees.

In spite of this incident, and the plentiful speculation about the possible role of disease in declining American bumble populations, there is little evidence that any disease played a significant role in the massive North American disappearance.  In fact, the healthy bumble population levels in the Western mountainous areas of North America and Canada argue against the disease theory.  These unaffected populations suggest another cause — one more often associated with animals than insects: loss of habitat.

Certain human activities have tremendously reduced the bumble’s natural habitat.  Modern land management, agricultural and aesthetic, continues to eliminate the open, unmown grasslands and areas of brush that bumbles need for nesting.

Over the past 40 years, agricultural planning and land-use have been revolutionized to provide maximum yields.  But these modifications have destroyed vast areas of potential habitat — especially those close to sources of honey and, therefore, locations in need of pollinators.

In the past, the typical farm included a substantial number of fallow tracts of land in which wild brush and unmown grass were allowed to grow.  These areas provided breaks between fields to slow or prevent the spread of disease.  Other uncultivated areas were buffers between different types of crops.  This separation was intended to prevent bleed-over of one type of crop into fields dedicated to another.  However, the practice of planting different types of crops was, again, a kind of insurance against the spread of disease.  While one type of crop might fall victim to disease, another would be less susceptible and survive to produce a much-needed yield at harvest.  And, finally, there was crop rotation.  Some fields were periodically left fallow to prevent a loss of fertility.  All of these uncultivated areas of the typical farm were ideal habitat for the bumblebee.

However, advances in pesticides and herbicides have so reduced the incidence of crop damage and disease that a new style of agriculture, sometimes called “monoculture,” dominates farm planning and geography.  The modern farm is a study in intensive land use and specialization.  All lands are cultivated and, often, with a single crop.  Any creeping wild brush or grass growth is eliminated, quickly and thoroughly, with extremely effective herbicides.  Chemical soil fertilization is just as effective and has made crop rotation a thing of the past.  The result is a modern farm with no place for bumbles.

Beyond our farms, today’s increasingly urban world is also working to eliminate unsightly brush and unmown lands.  Even road embankments and open park areas are regularly mowed.  This creates a more pleasing cosmetic effect, but at the expense of bumblebee habitat.

In notable contrast, the bumble’s habitat remains relatively intact in the less farm-friendly mountainous areas of the Western United States and Canada.  And it is in just these areas, less touched by modern farming or systematic public landscaping, that bumble populations remain strong.

At least one organization, the Xerces Society, named for the extinct California butterfly, Xerces Blue, is currently working to advance conservation of bumblebee habitat.  The society focuses on several conservation issues including the preservation of native pollinators.  In 2010, the society’s scientists developed a bee-friendly conservation strategy, the Yolo Natural Heritage Program, operated in Yolo County California.

Alas, there have only been a few sightings, but let’s all keep our fingers crossed for the bumblebee’s return.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

29 August 2013

About the Author

Robotic Bees and Mini-Drone Surveillance Bees

25 July 2013

Scientists at Harvard are working on the development the first robotic bee. They hope that their robo-bee will, someday, be able to pollinate flowers and crops just like the organic original: the honeybee.

Beginning in 2009, Harvard’s “Micro Air Vehicles Project” has used titanium and plastic to replicate the functions, if not the appearance, of the familiar honeybee. The robo-bee pops up, complete with wings, from a quarter-sized metal disk. The the creators hope that, one day, “robo-bees” will be engineered to fly in swarms, live in artificial hives, and coordinate both their target locations and pollination methodologies.

In fact, the researcher’s vision of the future “robo-bee” is so striking that one writer expressed the wish that the project’s spokesperson add the phrase “for the good of all mankind” to each progress report. Without it, readers might be reminded of all the movies “about technology that eventually destroys mankind.” In fact, the robo-bee may help save us or, at least, save our food supply.

Bees have been dropping like (the proverbial) flies for over 7 years now. The current bee depopulation was termed a “disappearance,” then, a “die-off” and, now, is formally referred to as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The decline in bee populations continues at an alarming rate. However, bee die-offs are not just a part of modern life. There have been a number of die-offs in that last couple of centuries. The original European honeybee disappeared from Europe long ago. Its successor, our modern honeybee, was imported from Turkey into Europe and, then, into the United States.

Bees get a lot of scientific attention because they are vital to American agriculture, which is vital to the American economy. Without bees, production of some of our most profitable crops would be impossible. Every few weeks, a news article announces the discovery of “the cause” of the threatened bee “extinction.” Blaming pesticides is almost fashionable. However, these sensational claims do little more than draw attention to particular studies, and the involved researchers. In fact, there probably isn’t a single cause. The current die-off seems to be the result of several factors working together. Sadly, our familiar honeybee may be gone long before the exact combination of factors can be found.

The puzzle goes like this. A bee (1) has a parasite like varroa mites; (2) is exhausted by transport over long distances; and (3) is exposed to a particular pesticide. Alone, none of these factors would kill a bee. Even all of these put together wouldn’t kill a bee. However, all of these put together might weaken the bee’s immune system. Then, with a compromised immune system, the bee contracts, and dies from, a completely unrelated disease. That disease is the final cause the bee’s death. However, the underlying cause is an immune system compromised, not by one factor, but by a particular combination of several factors. For now, that combination remains a mystery.

While science fiction films have portrayed the replacement of human beings with robots, films have never explored the possibly sinister side of robo-bee. Imagine a robotic “Stepford Bee” hiding quietly in the wings waiting for death of the last honeybee. And, then, a “brave new” technological world–without any bees at all!

There is something a bit creepy about human-engineered bees pollinating crops grown from human-engineered seeds. One writer described the disturbing vision as “swarms of tiny robot bees . . . pollinating those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.”

By the way, one developer of those “GMO cash crops,” Monsanto, sponsored a recent “Bee Health Summit” in Saint Louis, Missouri. A company spokesperson acknowledged that the beekeepers might have heard some “scary stuff” about Monsanto. The summit is the company’s effort to “introduce itself to the beekeeping industry” and “raise their comfort level.”  And there was some discomfort with one beekeeping guest commenting, “I can’t believe I’m at Monsanto.”

On the comforting side, Monsanto is after one of the oldest and most clearly identified factors in declining bee health, the parasitic varroa mite, which spreads a variety of viruses to honeybees. Researchers with Beeologics, one of Monsanto’s recent acquisitions, are planning to use RNA, a genetic regulator that determines how a plant or insect “works.” The RNA would be fed to the bee and, then, would be ingested by the mites. Once in the mite’s system, the RNA would “turn off” the mite’s virus transmitting gene.

With this RNA intervention, and other technologies, our honeybees may yet be saved from relative extinction.  Then, their robotic replacements would have to remain on the shelf.  But hold on. Genetically engineering the mite is only one step closer to genetically engineering the honey bee. So, we may be saved from robotic bees by . . . GMO bees?

Well, as our GMO bees pollinate our GMO crops, we can only feel a pang of sorrow for our robo-bee languishing in the shadows. With a revived, genetically engineered super-honeybee, where could a robotic bee go? What would it do?

No problem.  Harvard’s Micro Air Vehicles Project had that covered from the beginning.  The project’s published reports also suggest potential military uses. So, robo-bee, with some market repositioning, becomes the world’s smallest drone.

Well, if Monsanto “saves” the honeybee, who will be interested in our newly re-branded and repositioned mini-drones? Again, possibly Monsanto, which, at least once in the past, retained a private security contractor “to protect its GMO crops.”   The “protection” was less exciting than it sounds.  It was limited to the simple monitoring of public information. 

Still, what security company couldn’t use swarms of surveillance mini-drones?  So, if Monsanto needs security in the future, robo-bee might play a part in the security provider’s services.

Finally, we end up with yet another, unexpected vision of our future.  Just picture it.  We stand watching the setting sun as swarms of genetically engineered super-bees pollinate “dystopian fields of GMO cash crops,” while we, ourselves, are closely surveilled by swarms of robo-bees or, rather, “mini-drones.”

Why does everything just keep getting weirder?

The End?

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

Thursday 25 July 2013

About the Author

[Author’s Note: Actually, Robo-Bee is a long, long way from rolling off the assembly line and into the fields.  Even farther away are the technologies and knowledge necessary to genetically engineer anything as complicated as an insect.]