Bumblebees Slow Down in Heat and Winter Gloom, So a New Greenhouse Robot Uses AI to Find Tomato Flowers and Puff Them With Air

Anyone who has grown tomatoes in the East Valley knows the frustration. The plants look healthy and covered in yellow flowers, and then the flowers fall off without leaving a single tomato behind. In a backyard, the usual culprit is the weather. In a commercial greenhouse, the same problem now has a robot assigned to it.

On Oct. 27, the Belgian biological control company Biobest announced the commercial launch of Polly, a pollination robot for tomato growers developed by Arugga AI Farming. Biobest said the launch followed five years of close collaboration in which the technology was developed, refined and tested in commercial greenhouses in Europe and North America. Polly uses cameras and AI-based image recognition to find flowers that are ready to be pollinated, then gives each one a precisely controlled puff of air to shake its pollen loose.

The robot is not meant to replace bees. Biobest’s pitch is that it keeps pollination steady during the stretches when bumblebees struggle, and the company’s explanation of why those stretches happen is useful reading for anyone growing tomatoes at home.

Why tomatoes need a shake

Tomato flowers are self-pollinating. Each blossom carries both the pollen-bearing anthers and the female stigma, so no second plant is required. The pollen still has to be knocked loose, though, and that takes vibration.

In greenhouses, that job usually goes to bumblebees, which grab a flower and vibrate their flight muscles to shake pollen free, a behavior known as buzz pollination. Biobest describes Polly’s air pulse as a way of replicating that buzz.

Bumblebees have limits. In winter, Biobest says, short days, low light, supplemental LED lighting and energy-saving thermal screens can all cut into their pollination. The company’s product page explains that thermal screens block the little ultraviolet light left in winter, which bees use to navigate, and that LED spectrums are not ideal for them either. Summer brings the opposite problem. Above 32 degrees Celsius, about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, bumblebees spend part of their time fanning to cool the hive, according to Biobest, and above 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, they mostly stop flying.

How Polly works

Polly rides on the pipe rails that already run between rows in many commercial tomato greenhouses, so growers do not need to install new track. Biobest’s product page breaks its work into three steps: cameras and sensors find the flowers that are ready, mechanical rails and nozzles deliver a calibrated air pulse to each selected flower, and the robot records crop data while it works.

Biobest says two recent changes made the robot ready for sale. It is faster, so one Polly can now cover a full hectare, about 2.5 acres, visiting every row every other day so each flower gets a pulse every two days. It also has an autonomous base. “Growers simply position the robot in the first row at the start of the day, and Polly takes care of pollination throughout the day without any further intervention,” Jorden van de Walle, Biobest’s product manager for pollination, said in the announcement. The product page says the robot moves to the other rows on its own and returns to its base at the end of the day.

The published specifications put battery life at up to 10 hours, with eight to 10 hours of charging daily and power use of about 2 kilowatt-hours a day. While it pollinates, Polly logs the average number of flowers per row, the rows pollinated each day and the height of the highest truss, and growers can see that data in a companion app.

What the trials show, and what they don’t

“Trials have consistently demonstrated yield improvements of 2–6%, while in most cases an increase of just 1.5% is enough to achieve a positive return on investment,” van de Walle said. Biobest’s product page lists four trials, citing Arugga trial reports from 2023 to 2025: a 5.2% gain over 11 weeks in Belgium in 2025, where heat stress had suppressed bee activity; a 5% gain in a 13-week summer trial in Michigan in 2023; a 4.3% gain over 21 weeks in Ontario, Canada, achieved despite an outbreak of tomato brown rugose fruit virus in both trial areas; and a 2% gain over a nine-month, full-season trial in Michigan.

Every one of those comparisons pitted Polly working with bumblebees against bumblebees alone. HortiSignal, a greenhouse industry news site, pointed out in its Oct. 29 coverage that the yield and coverage figures are supplier-reported rather than independently validated, that trial sites and conditions differed, and that the comparisons do not show robots replacing hives. Biobest did not publish a price in its announcement. Growers can lease the robot for a yearly fee that includes maintenance, support and spare parts, or buy it outright with a five-year warranty.

Biobest also notes that Polly can serve tomato operations that do not use bumblebees at all. For everyone else, the company’s own frequently asked questions answer the obvious one directly: Polly does not replace bumblebees.

The backyard version costs nothing

Home gardeners will not be leasing a robot that stands more than 6 feet tall, but the problem Polly addresses is the same one that strips fruit from tomato plants in Arizona yards, and the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension offers low-tech fixes.

In its guide to tomato challenges, the extension says temperature is one of the biggest factors in fruit set here. Fruit set slows when daytime temperatures reach 90 degrees and stops at 94 degrees, or when nighttime temperatures stay above 75. Heat makes pollen grains clump together, and many pollinators stop working when it gets hot. At the other end of the scale, nights below 55 degrees also stop fruit set, which matters for East Valley gardeners with tomatoes still on the vine as November nights cool off.

The extension’s remedies all come down to vibration, the same principle behind Polly. Give the plants a good shake before the day warms up. Flick the flowers with a finger. Encourage bumblebees in the yard. Or, as the guide suggests for a more high-tech approach, hold an electric toothbrush against the flower clusters for a few seconds.

Polly is built for commercial glasshouses measured in hectares, and its makers are careful to call it a partner for bees rather than a substitute. For the rest of us, it is a reminder that every tomato starts with a flower getting shaken at the right moment, whether by a bumblebee, a breeze, a robot or a gardener with a toothbrush on a cool morning.