Flowers beauty

Soap bubbles that deliver pollen to flowers could offer an alternative way of fertilising plants as bee populations decline, while being more delicate than other methods.

Eijiro Miyako at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his colleagues developed the technique and successfully used it to pollinate a pear orchard. “I jumped for joy,” he says.

Miyako and his team mixed pear pollen grains with a soap solution containing nutrients and loaded the mixture into a bubble gun. They then used the gun to release bubbles into a pear orchard, with about two to 10 bubbles hitting each flower, and later measured their success rate by counting the flowers that bore fruit.

They found that pollination using their soap bubbles had a similar success rate to pollination of the plants by hand, with approximately 95 per cent of the flowers bearing fruit in both cases.

Using soap bubbles is much less labour intensive than manually pollinating every flower, says Miyako. Soap bubbles are also much gentler and therefore less likely to damage delicate flowers, he says.