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

Now I wonder

[inerte]

If you could "mark" the bees with a substance that could be seen by a radar and automatically launch something to explode the mine.

Another Advantage Over Dogs

[greenhide]

...Bees are much lighter. Unless I'm mistaken, a dog used to sniff out a mine could easily set it off, even if it were careful. The mines are sensitive enough to go off when a small child steps on them, so they are clearly sensitive enough for dogs. Bees, on the other hand, weigh close to nothing and probably would not ever be able to set off a mine.

The question is: once a bee pinpoints a mine (by landing it, I suppose), how is that mine put out of comission?

Finally: I can understand how dogs can be trained and motivated to do this sort of thing. What incentive would make these bees "do our bidding"?

Re:110 Million Landmines?

[dmadole]

If I'm doing my math right, which I'm probably not, assuming each land mine is a cylinder 1 inch tall and 6 inches in diameter, 110,000,000 of these things would form a cube 33 miles on each side. Are there really that many?

Well, at least you were right when you said you were probably doing your math wrong.

If they were 1 inch tall and 6 inches in diameter and you stacked them based on a square grid:

The space each mine occupies in the grid is:

1 in x 6 in x 6 in = 36 in^3
36 in^3 / 12 in / 12 in / 12 in = 0.0208333 ft^3

So 110,000,000 of them are:

.0208333 ft^3 x 110,000,000 = 2,291,666.666 ft^3
2,291,666.666 ft^3 ^ (1/3) = 131.841 ft

So, they would make a cube only 131 ft 10 inches.

Of course, if they are really round, you could stack each layer honeycomb-style and the cube would be even smaller. As they say, the solution is left as an exercise for the reader.