Honeybees Trained to Find Landmines

KingMeer writes "A group of researchers at the University of Montana have trained honeybees to seek out landmines. Apparently they are much more effective than dogs, making them a practical tool for finding the 110 million landmines worldwide."

Comments

Sugar is the reward

[GuyMannDude]

Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead 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.

Taken from a previous NYT article (mirror 1, mirror 2)

GMD

Re:Uh, no... Killer Bees.

[Scrameustache]

Heard of killer bees?

Sure...

They were invented by combining African bees with European Honeybees, in order to get a honeybee that could thrive in the more tropical regions in Brazil.

That was the plan.

Of course genetic engineering will take the two best features, right?

It wasn't genetic engineering, it was cross breeding...

But no, it picked the two worst. Instead of quickly reproducing gentle honeybees, they got quickly reproducing aggressive attackbees... So, yeah, it was "SUCH a mess".

That's not exactly what happened.
They were halfway throught the cross breeding program, using hives with metal plaques nailed to the only opening that had a slit wide enough for workers but too narrow for queens, hence preventing "swarming" and the release of reproducting bees in the environment.
One weekend, someone came to the hives, removed the plaques using tools found on site and let the bees out.

It wasn't science run amock, it was either willfull sabotage or tremendous human stupidity.
Someone made the effort of removing nailed plaques, not the scientist's fault.