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Honey bees recruited to pinpoint land-mines
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Sandia, University of Montana researchers try training bees to find buried landmines [27 Apr '99] - Sandia National Laboratories
US Defence Advanced Research Project Agency
HONEY bees are to be recruited by scientists to locate land-mines.
They believe that bees may be able to pick up minute traces of the explosive TNT as they forage for pollen. The insects attract dust, soil and pollen to their fuzzy, statically charged bodies while flying a mile or more from the hive. It is hoped that they will also pick up traces of the small amounts of explosives that land-mines leak into soil and water.
The study to see if bees can be trained to located traces of TNT, a primary ingredient of land-mines, is being conducted at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, working with Prof Jerry Bromenshenk at the University of Montana, Missoula. The ultimate goal of the project is to screen large areas by establishing beehives near suspected minefields, monitoring bees' flight activity, and analysing hive samples. Prof Bromenshenk said the work could also be applied to pollutants.
Earlier work showed that traces of explosives could be found in hives near firing ranges. Prof Bromenshenk said: "Bees are like flying dust mops. Wherever they go, they pick up dust, airborne chemicals, and other samples. If it's out there, they'll find it."
Prof Bromenshenk's team plans to use "honeybee condos" that check for explosives. Instruments to analyse the air in the hive, the bees themselves or genetically modified bacteria that fluoresce when they encounter TNT, are being developed by Sandia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
In a field test this spring, Prof Bromenshenk's research team will tag 50 bees in a controlled experiment. Each tag will store information used to identify a bee and will weigh less than a grain of rice.
Pacific Northwest engineers have designed electronics and software that "read" information on the tags. As a bee leaves or enters the hive it triggers the reader, which scans its tag and sends the bee's identification code, direction of flight and the time to a computer.
Researchers will also conduct a second field test to study how far bees travel to determine the distance bees can forage and how long it takes them to reach the mines. Prof Bromenshenk said a British developed radar tracking system will be used, said .
One goal of tests at Montana is to train bees to seek out the chemical components of explosives. If bees can be trained to associate TNT with food, such as sugar syrup, they may spend more time near plants and soils contaminated with TNT, increasing the odds that they can find mines. Prof Bromenshenk has demonstrated that by providing a new bee colony with feeders tainted with a marker chemical, then gradually moving the feeders farther from the hive and eventually removing them, bees can be trained to forage wherever they smell the chemical.
Sandia is studying if plants growing in TNT-tainted soil will take up TNT residues. If plants that readily accumulate TNT could be identified, a suspected minefield could be seeded with those plants by air to maximise the bees' chances of finding the mines.
The work is funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Sixty people a day are killed or maimed by landmines and 40,000 new landmines are deployed each week, according to the Red Cross.
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