[Pollinator] Bees and Corona Virus Detection - Washington Post

[Laurie Adams]

Scientists may have found a new coronavirus rapid-testing method: Bees

Scientists say they have trained bees to stick out their tongues when they
detect the scent of the coronavirus. (InsectSense)
By
Marisa Iati <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/marisa-iati/>
May 7, 2021 at 5:40 p.m. EDT
405

The fight against the coronavirus
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2> pandemic
has scientists tapping an unlikely resource: the finely tuned olfactory
sense of bees.

Dutch researchers on Monday said they have trained honeybees
<https://www.wur.nl/en/news-wur/Show/Training-bees-to-smell-the-coronavirus.htm>
to
stick out their tongues when presented with the virus’s unique scent,
acting as a kind of rapid test.

Although it’s a less conventional method than lab tests, the scientists
said teaching bees to diagnose the coronavirus could help fill a gap in
low-income countries with limited access to more sophisticated technology,
like materials for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.

“Not all laboratories have that, especially in smaller-income countries,”
said Wim van der Poel, a professor at Wageningen University, which led the
research. “Bees are everywhere, and the apparatus is not very complicated.”

The scientists trained roughly 150 bees with a Pavlovian conditioning
method in which they gave the insects a sugar-water solution each time they
were exposed to the smell of the coronavirus. When the bees were presented
with a sample that was negative for the virus, they received no reward.

After repeatedly extending their tongues — technically called proboscises —
for the sugar water, the scientists said the bees learned to stick out
their tongues for a positive sample, even with no reward offered. Within
hours, the insects were trained to identify the virus a few seconds after
encountering it, the researchers said.

While the research continues, van der Poel said the scientists believe they
can achieve about a 95 percent accuracy rate if they use multiple insects
to sniff each sample. Their results have not yet been published or
peer-reviewed.

“Our first goal was to demonstrate that we could train bees to do this, and
that’s where we succeeded,” van der Poel said. “And now we are calculating,
and we are continuing the work to see how sensitive the method is.”

The idea for the research sprang from the founders of Dutch
insect-technology start-up InsectSense, who had previously used bees
<https://insectsense.com/about-us-full/> to detect mineral-rich ore and
land mines. When staff realized they could also train bees to find the
coronavirus, they looped in the university researchers.

Each time the scientists wanted to train a new set of bees, they used a
refrigerator or the natural external temperature to cool them down and make
them less active, van der Poel said. Then they put the bees in harnesses so
they would stay still while confronted with the samples, which consist of
the respiratory material from a nasal swab mixed with chemicals.

The bees smelled samples from both minks and humans, and were similarly
good at identifying the virus in both situations, van der Poel said.

InsectSense said it is working on a machine that could train multiple bees
simultaneously to make the diagnoses, as well as a biochip that would use
genes from the cells that bees smell with to detect the virus. That method
would circumvent the need to use live insects, which van der Poel said
might be impractical on a large scale.

“If this is going to work, it can be very fast and very cheap,” van der
Poel said. “And that would be very convenient.”

While researchers are also examining whether dogs could be used
<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9> to detect the
coronavirus, van der Poel said he thought scientists could more easily test
samples with several bees than several dogs, given the relative ease of
handling bees. A study
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210416120121.htm> published
by the University of Pennsylvania last month suggested that dogs can detect
the coronavirus with 96 percent accuracy.

Dirk de Graaf, a professor who studies bees at Ghent University in
Belgium, told
Reuters
<https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/bees-netherlands-trained-detect-covid-19-infections-2021-05-06/#:~:text=Oddly%20EnoughBees%20in%20the%20Netherlands%20trained%20to%20detect%20COVID%2D19%20infections&text=Dutch%20researchers%20have%20trained%20bees,test%20results%20to%20just%20seconds>
he
was skeptical that coronavirus-sniffing bees would replace lab tests.

“It is a good idea, but I would prefer to carry out tests using the classic
diagnostic tools rather than using honeybees for this,” he said. “I am a
huge bee lover, but I would use the bees for other purposes than detecting
covid-19.”

In addition to identifying diseases, animals — including dogs, wasps and
grasshoppers
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2233645-cyborg-grasshoppers-have-been-engineered-to-sniff-out-explosives/>
—
have long been used to detect explosives. Researchers working for the U.S.
Department of Defense began to study the concept
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/us/bees-learning-smell-of-bombs-with-backing-from-pentagon.html>,
known as “insect sniffing,” in the late 1990s.



Laurie Davies Adams

Director of Programs
Pollinator Partnership
Transamerica Pyramid
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San Francisco, CA 94111

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