Designer Creates Artificial Flowers to Feed Hungry Bees in Big Cities

Rebuilding the world's shrinking bee population will be a multi-level effort. Legislators and citizens are already doing what they can to conserve the pollinators, by planting the right things and banning some pesticides, and now a designer from the Netherlands is stepping up with a product made to help city bees. As Fast Company reports, Matilde Boelhouwer's project, called Food for Buzz, uses artificial flowers to feed bees in concrete jungles.

Boelhouwer's flowers are made from polyester "petals" pinned to a 3D-printed hollow receptacle. The receptacle connects to a stem attached to base filled with sugar. When it rains, water drips down the stem and collects in the sugar base, creating a sugar-water solution which is then pumped back up to the receptacle where insects can drink it.

To attract the most prevalent pollinators—bees, bumblebees, butterflies, hoverflies, and moths—Boelhouwer borrowed elements from real-life flowers. Her creations are colorful and symmetrical, which signal to insects that they're a good source of food. And while they may pass for the real thing with bees, Boelhouwer's flowers are all spins on flowers found in nature rather than exact copies of them.

Artificial bee snacks don't necessarily need to be beautiful to be effective. This Bee Saving Paper from Warsaw, for example, is covered in a biodegradable UV paint that's invisible to the human eye. But the flowers made for Food for Buzz can provide life-saving fuel to bees while beautifying urban spaces at the same time.

Boelhouwer tells Fast Company that her polyester flowers do succeed in attracting pollinators, but more research still needs to be done to determine how they compare to other artificial bee feeders.