[Pollinator] The Week: Croatia's land mine-detecting honey bees

[Jennifer Tsang]

http://theweek.com/article/index/244438/croatias-land-minendashdetecting-hon
ey-bees#

 



http://theweek.com/article/index/244438/croatias-land-minendashdetecting-hon
ey-bees

 

Science

Croatia's land mine-detecting honey bees

An estimated 90,000 land mines were planted in the country from 1991 to 1995

Published May 20, 2013, at 4:32 PM



The sweet aroma of… TNT?   Photo: Thinkstock/iStockPhoto

Crazy ants may be causing headaches for homeowners in the southeastern
United States
<http://theweek.com/article/index/244431/crazy-ants-invade-the-us-southeast-
what-you-should-know> . But over in Croatia, insects - honey bees, to be
precise - are being tapped for more useful ends: Detecting dangerous and
undetonated land mines.

Croatia is littered with what NatureWorldNews terms
<http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/2000/20130520/bees-trained-detect-l
and-mines-save-lives-croatia.htm>  "the relics of war." An estimated 90,000
land mines were planted from 1991 to 1995 during the Balkan Wars that tore
the former Yugoslavia apart. In the two decades since, undetonated mines
have claimed 316 lives, including 66 de-miners, reports the
<http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-05-19/honeybees-trained-in-croatia-to-f
ind-land-mines> Associated Press.

Enter Nikola Kezic, a professor and honey bee expert at Zagreb University.
He has created an experiment that tricks bees into associating the smell of
food with the smell of TNT. Imagine you're a de-miner: Instead of setting
foot in a potentially dangerous mine field to sift through dirt manually,
you would first unleash a swarm of insects that would gather over latent
explosives without setting them off.

According to NatureWorldNews, Kezic used
<http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/2000/20130520/bees-trained-detect-l
and-mines-save-lives-croatia.htm>  "classic Pavlovian conditioning" to train
the bees into becoming unsuspecting bomb squads, mixing a sugar solution
with TNT powder:

Once enough bees are trained to seek the scent of TNT, swarms of them will
be released into already de-mined fields, where there is still a real risk
of accidentally tripping an unaccounted for land mine. Researchers can use
heat-seeking cameras to track the trained bees, which will gather around any
undetected mines. [NatureWorldNews
<http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/2000/20130520/bees-trained-detect-l
and-mines-save-lives-croatia.htm> ]

If successfully utilized in the field, the bees would be joining good
company: Dogs, dolphins, rodents, and all sorts of other animals have served
as bio-tools to find dangerous explosive weapons. The United States, in
fact, has been experimenting with bomb-detecting insect swarms since at
least 2002, although it's unclear how much progress researchers have made.

The New York Times reported
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/science/13BEES.html>  back then
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/science/13BEES.html>  that the Air Force
even planned on outfitting the paramilitary bees with computer-trackable
sensors about the size of a grain of salt. Yes, that means the government
was building a micro-squadron of cybernetically augmented, bomb-sniffing
insects.

 

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