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Maverick and Goose

Long before unmanned aerial vehicles starting buzzing over city skies, a "drone" was better known as the name for a male bee.

It's rather fitting, as farmers are now looking to the mini flying machines to fulfil bees' duties.

With bee populations ravaged by things like warmer temperatures, pesticides and habitat destruction, man-made drones could help with pollination - especially in glasshouses where bees can become disorientated.

My colleagues Rina Chandran and Nita Bhalla reported on farms in Australia and Kenya to find out more for a new story on the future of tomatoes, part of our Rerooted series on food.

About 190 million tons of tomatoes are produced each year, and they are increasingly grown in protected environments as farmers face more extreme weather linked to climate change, pests and land shortages.

As the decline in natural pollinators becomes a critical threat to our ability to feed the world, one indoor farm in Two Wells, South Australia, is looking to a couple of airborne heroes to step up: Maverick and Goose.

Named after the characters from the "Top Gun" movies, these two mini drones - measuring about 38cm (15 inches) diagonally - cover 10 rows of tomatoes, hovering over the plants at a fixed speed and loosening pollen with their downward draft.

The drones were designed by a Singapore-based tech firm called Polybee. Its founder and CEO Siddharth Jadhav said drones are perfectly suited for self-pollinating crops like strawberries and tomatoes, but the tech must be easy for farm workers to use with minimal training.

"Drones are an elegant way to solve the problem - you just programme them, and it's a big risk off the table for growers who have so many other risks to deal with," he said.

Bees vs elephants

More than a third of the world's food production depends on bees, so finding alternative pollination methods to make up for nature's decline has become urgent.

But new technologies like drones, as well as other innovations like forecasting yields with AI, are harder for poorer nations to afford and access.

And what if we supported bees instead? Give more help to nature's original drones, along with the queens and workers.

From Azerbaijan to Venezuela, efforts are underway to encourage beekeeping and preserve local bees. And in many cases, bees come with extra perks.

In Kenya, for example, honeybees do not just pollinate plants but provide crucial additional income for farmers through their honey. And they can even be used as so-called "living fences" to protect farms from nearby wildlife, such as elephants.

For farmers living on the edge of the Meru National Park in central Kenya, when elephants try to breach the wire, the hives are triggered and bees sent buzzing into action - saving crops as well as the lives of villagers and the elephants from retaliations.

"Drones cannot perform all the duties that the bees are doing in the environment, they can't compete to that level," said Newton Simiyu, a project manager at the Born Free Foundation, the conservation charity that first developed the beehive fences.

"Technology is advancing, but nature will always remain superior," he said.

See you next week,

Jack