Apple Bees: How the World Started Renting Robot Pollinators After Killing the Real Ones

From the orchards of Normandy to the rooftop gardens of Singapore, a new pollinator has checked in—one that arrives by drone propeller and leaves behind a QR-code receipt instead of pollen. Meet the Apple Bee: not an actual insect, but the latest attempt by humanity to fix a problem we created by throwing more humanity at it. In 2024, several ag-tech start-ups (with names like BloomBit, HiveLyft, and the ominously vague PollenX) have begun leasing swarms of palm-sized quadcopters to farmers whose natural bee populations have collapsed faster than a Silicon Valley bank. The drones hover flower to flower, armed with tiny paintbrushes and a proprietary pollen blend, doing what Apis mellifera used to do for free—only now it costs €7.50 per hectare and comes with a Terms-of-Service agreement longer than the Paris Climate Accord.

The global stakes are, predictably, enormous. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of the world’s food crops depend on pollination. With wild bee numbers down 37 percent in Europe, 45 percent in North America, and “data pending” in countries too busy with coups to count insects, the race is on to mechanize the birds and the bees. China began hand-pollinating pear trees in Sichuan years ago—an army of day laborers with chicken-feather wands—so the Apple Bee is effectively an upgrade from human pollen prostitutes to robotic gig workers. In Chile, vineyard owners toast the drones while sipping Carménère, quietly relieved that grapes don’t file sexual-harassment suits. Meanwhile, Australian almond growers have embraced the tech with the same gusto they once reserved for cane toads, importing 40,000 Apple Bees just in time for this year’s bloom cycle. The drones are painted yellow and black, because branding is half the battle, and nothing says “trust me with your reproductive future” like a color scheme plagiarized from a creature we’ve nearly eradicated.

Of course, every solution breeds new anxieties. Kenyan smallholders worry that Apple Bees will buzz their fields, pollinate once, then abscond—much like international NGOs—leaving behind only a subscription invoice. French activists have begun sabotaging the drones, calling them “les abeilles Uber,” a deliciously Gallic insult implying both exploitation and poor labor standards. And in Japan, where aging farmers already outsource strawberry pollination to hand-held vibrators (a sentence I never thought I’d type), the arrival of Apple Bees has triggered existential debates on NHK: if robots perform the sex act for plants, what becomes of human intimacy? The segment concluded with a professor shrugging: “At least the drones don’t ghost you afterward.”

The broader significance is darker than a barista’s single-origin roast. Apple Bees are a monument to our talent for monetizing the ruins of ecosystems we razed in the first place. Venture capital loves them precisely because they solve a scarcity problem without addressing the scarcity’s cause—pesticides, habitat loss, climate chaos. It’s the same business model that sells bottled water after polluting the river, or offers premium oxygen bars in Delhi. One Silicon Valley pitch deck, leaked to Dave’s Locker, projects a $12 billion market by 2030, with a helpful slide titled “Regulatory Capture Opportunities.” Translation: lobby hard enough, and governments will subsidize the rental fees while labelling it “green infrastructure.” The deck also features a cartoon bee wearing sunglasses and a Bluetooth headset—because nothing reassures investors like anthropomorphized pollinator cosplay.

Yet for all the cynicism, the orchards still need pollen moved from stigma to stamen, and the Apple Bees are, for now, moving it. In a world where irony is the last renewable resource, we have engineered a future in which flowers lose their virginity to robots so that humans can eat honey-roasted almonds while doom-scrolling. The bees themselves—those that remain—watch from hedgerows with compound-eye disdain, perhaps calculating how long before we rent them out as nostalgic props at eco-weddings. Until then, the drones buzz on, a swarm of tiny plastic messiahs delivering salvation at 3.7 volts per stigma. If you listen closely on a still morning in the Loire Valley, you can almost hear the future hum: the sound of an ecosystem outsourcing its own foreplay.