You already know that vibrators are great for erotic release. It turns out they can do something similar for plants. In an article at Wired, Gwen Pearson discusses how vibrators found a home on the farm by mimicking the intense thrum of bumblebees.
Tomatoes grown in greenhouses are walled off from their usual pollinators, so farmers developed a way to solve the no-bees problem. We don’t need fancy mini-drones; we need robo-vibrators.
Vibrators are very effective bee-substitutes for plants that need buzz pollination. It’s fairly detailed work though; in one trial it took 11.75 hours to pollinate 640 tomato plants with a vibrator, slightly over 1 minute per plant. The increase in fruit yield is usually well worth the time and effort, though.
Vibrators are sometimes used on crops that normally wind pollinate to increase their fruit set. In the words of the Date Palm and Tropical Fruits Research Institute of Iran: “The results are excellent and the pollen goes everywhere.”
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