This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Hundreds of millions of metric tons of plastics are produced every year, and most of them end up sitting in landfills or polluting natural environments after use. These plastics endure for dozens to hundreds of years.
But some scientists are on the lookout for solutions to this problem. And now, one team of researchers might have found a potential solution in bee nests. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that a natural plastic made by bees may offer design lessons for plastics that degrade naturally in far less time.
Researchers discovered the aptly named "cellophane bee," or Colletes inaequalis, almost 50 years ago. They noticed the bees lined their underground nests with a flexible, translucent material made from polyester and silk. The material is produced in a specialized gland, called the Dufour's gland, that is connected to the bee's stinger.
Interestingly, the bee nest linings did not appear to accumulate at nesting sites over time, suggesting they were degrading quickly, despite being made with a type of polyester. The authors of the new study write, "Bees of this genus nest annually in aggregations that can consist of more than 10,000 individual nests, with subsequent generations of bees returning to the same aggregations and building new nests underground every year for decades. Despite this perpetual addition of plastic into the soil, and despite Colletes polyester having a lower ester density than either PPDL or PE-18,18, plastic does not appear to accumulate in Colletes aggregations." The polyester produced by cellophane bees resembles polyethylene in its molecular packing.
Most comparable synthetic materials have resisted degradation, even under industrial composting conditions. The researchers involved in the new study believe that the cellophane bee nest material may offer an alternative to nondegradable plastics, but the material had not been well studied. Since the polyester nest material had not been studied in depth since its discovery, the team took matters into their own hands.
To better characterize the nest material, the team conducted chemical tests, heating measurements, microscopy and X-ray scattering on newly constructed material and then again after four, seven and 11 months to determine how quickly it degraded. All materials were extracted from the same site. The material showed impressive degradation in a short amount of time.
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