How will humans (and their robots) continue the reproduction of fruits after the bees are gone? An investigation into two responses to colony collapse disorder—a compendium of forces that threaten the extinction of honey bees, a ”companion species” upon whom the global agricultural system depends. 

In China, human laborers inseminate pear flowers by hand, one-by-one, on an industrial scale. Biomimetic design is done with cigarette filters on a tiny family farm in Cangxi, and with chicken feathers on the largest fruit orchard in the world in Anhui. Every spring, 7,000 day laborers arrive in Anhui to inseminate pear flowers. 

As Chinese salaries grow, pollination labor is becoming too expensive for pear production to remain profitable, and simultaneously the middle class has given rise to the domestic Chinese tourist. A rural town invents a ”traditional pear blossom festival”, and in the hope that if there are no pears in the future, at least the flowers will attract tourists and their money. A new way to extract capital from pear trees—through symbolic representation— is selfies with flowers galore rather than caloric nutrition as pears. 

Meanwhile at a Harvard University laboratory, engineers are building the Robobee—tiny drones designed in close study of insect morphology, ostensibly for artificial pollination. 

Evolutionary design is extracted from natural systems in order to build efficient robot drone “bees” folding the drone metaphor back in on itself. The preposterous nature of replacing complex and interdependent ecological systems with robots is not lost on the lead engineers, and we learn that the Robobee is destined for activities in the world beyond just pollination. 

An investigation of life and death, labor and technology, and interspecies sex in an era of late-stage capitalism and ecological crisis. 

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Images by Miriam Simun → @yoururgetobreatheisalie