Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bomb-Detecting Bees

Posted by timothy on from the thanks-honey dept.

jmichaelg writes: "The NY Times is running an article on using bees to sniff out bombs. Bees can smell scents that are diluted to a few parts per billion (the Times says "few thousand parts per trillion," but what do you expect in an innumerate society?) The bees are trained to pass up flowers in favor of bombs within a couple of hours using sugar water as the reward. What I found to be one of the most interesting findings was that the bees communicate what the target scent is so you only need to teach a few bees what to look for and they'll pass the word on to rest of the colony. The Dept of Defense is developing a radio transmitter the size of a grain of salt they'll glue to the bees to communicate where the bomb is to the bee handlers."

3 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. PPQ by DaoudaW · · Score: 4, Informative

    hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.

    Speaking of innumeracy, that would be parts per quadrillion, not parts per billion.

    1. Re:PPQ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Well, it's an American web site, what can you expect. The British terminology is actually also standard in other languages; the Americans are the odd ones out.

  2. Bees teaching bees by DaoudaW · · Score: 3, Informative

    And how do the bee teach to each other the smell of TNT ?

    I just heard this story on NPR and the researcher described how to train the bees. Simply add the scent of TNT to a feeding station filled with sugar water. Pretty soon the bees associate the smell of TNT with food.

    I'd guess the bees learn from each other in a similar way. They follow the directions (given in the normal way) to the feeding station and soon they too associate the smell with food.