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

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"?

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

I was already paranoid when I went to the airport

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

I think I'm going to stop flying altogether if I have to get checked by bees.

What happens if you swat one of them? They try and charge you with killing a federal officer if you kill a police dog, so what about the bomb-sniffing bees? Would I find myself in the federal pen for smashing a bee?

On a more serious note, what if the bees all swarm over the bomb-disposal equipment instead of the landmines? The article says that they are just looking for DNT particles, in the parts per trillion range, so wouldn't this be present on the bomb-disposal equipment?

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.