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Bees Help Detectives Catch Serial Killers
Hugh Pickens writes "The way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers — because just as bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes, says a University of London research team. The researchers' analysis describes how bees create a 'buffer zone' around their hive where they will not forage, to reduce the risk of predators and parasites locating the nest. This behavior pattern is similar to the geographic profile of criminals stalking their victims. 'Most murders happen close to the killer's home, but not in the area directly surrounding a criminal's house, where crimes are less likely to be committed because of the fear of getting caught by someone they know,' says Dr. Nigel Raine. Criminologists will fold this insight into their models using details about crime scenes, robbery locations, abandoned cars, even dead bodies, to hone the search for a suspect."
we've known this for a long time sherlock...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If read and understood by a sane serial killer (assuming these things exist). Could they then pattern their kills around a location other than where they live? Hence leading police to profile the wrong location based upon these kind of patterns?
doing their serial killing far away, bombing countries half the world away. While just imposing embargoes on those next door, to reduce the risk to the hive. You don't need Bee theory, forensics or the CSI team to figure out who is doing the killing though.
TFA mentions that they are also tracking the bees by glueing RFID tags to their backs. I wonder if any politicians reading this might start thinking of a more direct way to use this work to catch criminals...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
The insight that killers don't kill too close to their homes help detectives. It has nothing to do with bees, really. Bees just happen to behave in the same way.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
crims don't do it on their home patch... as too many people know them... I live in a dodgy estate... lots of people with heavy form here... but it's safe for me as they do all their crime where any potential witnesses aren't likely to know them. The only worries I have are from the inexperienced petty types desperate to get money for their next fix... and they'll only be able to do me the once... cos my friends will pay them a visit...
That's the problem with psycological theories and profiling. As soon as the subject knows the model, they probably stop following it.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
Use one program to select the town of your victim at random.
Find a written phonebook from the area and pick a page at random using ten sided dice.
And use the same dice to pick a person at random from that page.
Now you have your victim - it could be you (start over), your neighbour, your boss - doesn't matter all that much.
Next you pick a method of execution at random as well.
If you have no modus operandi, they can't really catch you. See Richard Kuklinski
But learn from his mistakes - if you're using a freezer to keep the time of death obscured, thaw them before you dump them.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
...it would really sting knowing that they were caught because of a bee.
I was honestly hoping they discovered a way to manipulate bees to hunt down serial killers and "catch" them.
oh well, back to my plans for the beezooka.
Wonder on what the numb3rs tv series is based. If i am not wrong the first 2 series did exactly that. Finding the pattern is not allways so hard. You just have to atribute everything to the right killer (freak, nerd).
In fire we trust http://www.getoto.net
I vaguely (it was so long ago - maybe 10 years) recall either a public radio program or a magazine article about a man who wrote a book about the same idea, based on lions' hunting habits - forming a ring around their home area, and there were some examples of actual criminals located with the help of this pattern.
Then I heard an old time radio program, "The Whistler", episode "X Marks A Murderer", originally aired 1945, Aug 20. A character noted that it is possible to calculate a killer's living area because the killer heads out in different directions but excludes the area near his own home.
This is just a way of marketing Bee Movie 2.
If they discover why colony collapse happens, then they could cause colony collapse disorder among serial killers. The concept seems very old as it has been stated. These principles would apply to all situations and to consider another application, how to identify the source of lobbyists that poison information wells. It would seem that they would have to go to great lengths to conceal their -hive- and would constantly move it to obfuscate matters further. All tools can be applied to help and hinder, the root cause still remains which is the conflict itself.
Is this what they call a sting operation?
...because it sounds more original that the typical movie formula:
1) Get a paper map of the city
2) Mark the location of each crime scene
3) Draw lines connecting the dots
4) Search for serial killer in the center of the inverted pentagram
The article uses the word murderers, which do in fact kill near their 'home turf', and by and large kill people they know, per known statistics. Though being a serial killer really isn't a crime itself, it's just a subtype of murderer that performs multiple instances.
Though, the fact that this subject matter is of high interest to selling movies, tv shows, and newspapers, then the real insight might be that a reporter is exaggerating this 'killer' relationship in order to gain readership to what many may consider a boring bee study.
I, for one, welcome our Hymenoptera overlords, and should like to inform them that as one with a knowledge of both Latin and Ancient Greek, I could prove invaluable to them in tracking down the ancient lost nectar mines.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I see two major flaws with applying this behavior to crime...
First, bees live in an essentially homogenous environment - They generally travel less than a mile, and have a more-or-less equal chance of finding something yummy in any direction from the hive. Most humans tend to live in population clusters (aka "cities"), with those preferring (or needing) solitude (ie, serial killers) tending toward the outskirts of the cities. Thus, their "hunting ground" would have a strong bias toward the city, with little correlation between where they live and where they kill.
Second, humans don't blindly follow instinct. They have the capacity to very carefully consider what the distribution of bodies says about them (with some of the most famous serial killers using that very distribution to send their message). They even have the capacity, knowing that the police will look for geographical patterns, to "frame" other people by carefully leaving bodies in the right places.
It sounds great to say that if a killer randomly goes out once a week, at least five miles from home, then kills the first convenient target, that you can pinpoint where he originates from. In practice, I don't see that as even remotely plausible.
How about a sane serial killer distributing their murders after reading this article? I can already imagine this article making it to the top at the SSK(Slashdot for Serial Killers) with more than a thousand comments(assuming we have that many serial killers) thanking kdawson for this insight into their psychology.
If you know where the killer's house is in order to draw this donut around it, why not just go there and arrest them? If you're arguing that the killing is in a donut, there are an infinite number of donuts that a killing could belong to, so I don't see how that helps you find the killer's house if you have any less than 3-4 body(ies) in different location(s) that are actually arranged in a donut around a central location.
stuff |
What a great idea, spend a bunch of public money researching something that constitutes 0.000001% of all crime.
It's just like numb3rs !
Actually, it's pretty interesting how they don't. It's like they can't help but follow it. A subconscious thing. Doesn't make logical sense to me, but their minds don't work like the rest of ours so it's hard to understand why they behave the way they do.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
"University of London" is a loose federation and should be treated as such, not all colleges are equal. This story should have been reported as originating from Queen Mary's College, University of London.
UL contains world-class institutions such as UCL, Kings and LSE, but it also contains places like Heythrop College, essentially a seminary in all but name.
This is exactly the issue that made my alma mater leave last year. When evaluating the quality of research, "University of London" is not a useful label.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I seem to remember the 'serial killers don't kill near their homes' thing being part of the plot in a Numb3rs episode a couple years back, but it wasn't in terms of bees. Granted, TV isn't an accurate representation of real life, but I don't think the writers came up with the idea entirely on their own.
The behavior of most people doesn't make logical sense to me. But then their minds don't work like mine.
Subconscious impulses affect the behavior of everyone, whether they accept it or not.
The Long Now Foundation
Brave bees help track down a serial killer! Find out more about these adorable heroic bees in the news at 11 o'clock tonight!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Isn't this basicaly gepoprofiling?
The Dutch magazine kijk has an article on it starting on page 18. Unfortunatly nothing online, expet the title of the article: Geoprofiling: Misdadigers pakken met een landkaart
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Seems to me that there are two kinds of serial criminals, first the more common instinctual that has a profile behavior pattern and is locked into acting it out psychologically. This one is the easier to catch because the behavior eventually becomes predictable. The second one is rarer and is either going to change the MO at apparently random times after using it for a time or is completely erratic and unpredictable. The second kind is usually either not caught or caught through serendipity.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It would be nice (especially for the subsequent 99) for the police to catch a murderer after the first one, not wait for 100 or so and then run a analysis on the distribution.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
So uh, anyone seen Muhammad Ali lately ?
He's been kinda quiet, a little too quiet.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
If this is true that they don't murder in the area near to where they live, doesn't this run counter to the basic idea behind offender lists? Maybe the people living in the immediate area near where an offender is living are aware of the situation. However if this study is true, then they people not in the surrounding area are the ones at risk. The entire idea of offender lists is filled with flaws.
Goddamned idiot cops again.. bees ?
So they plot the crime scenes on a map, extrapolate a circle once they have enough data points (which means they've been sucking their thumbs for a while), then go to the center of the circle and hope to find some wacko with weapons and whatever other evidence they've so carefully planted to save face.
Who needs solid investigative skills and eyewitnesses when ZOOLOGY can achieve the same success rate with none of the hard work ?
I want to like law enforcement, I really do! But before they can start catching serial killers and other heinous criminals, they need to narrow the definition of "crime" back down to something manageable. How can you expect to have a secure territory when all your cruisers are out handing random fines and pestering teenagers ? To solve a problem, one requires focus and attention!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
How would you know?
It is always the steward! We need to call Matlock for help!
This isn't ground breaking research. I have a degree in the Social Sciences. When I was researching papers and taking a few criminology courses, the professors, texts and journals had said that it wasn't uncommon for law enforcement to use this. Are there more specific ways they use this? Sure. Its no mystery. But there's no reason to be more specific.
Sooner or later, these people are generally caught because they made one mistake. And its impossible to know all the techniques and science used to catch them. I would only hope that other than "DNA evidence", the other methods used in serial killer cases wouldn't be revealed. Its bad enough we are sort of celebrating their existence in movies and TV shows. Its worse that some of them get away for 20 years, have a kid and a wife and they never know about it.
yeah, and how's that going? I bet if we use these models we could find those WMD too!
give me a break.
I am fully in favor using all tech at our disposal to be better at law enforcement (while still respecting civil rights of course), but what scares me is the underlying theories behind how they use this data. They actually think that all human behavior is quantifiable and that if we can just get a big enough database and the right algorithm (and maybe some pre-cogs) then we can END ALL CRIME! never...
Human behavior (including that of serial killers) has tendencies, but that's as far as we can pin it down. Deal with it.
As the first post explained, humans understand the 'don't shit where you eat' principle innately.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Um... because I read the newspaper, and watch the aforementioned crime dramas (a lot of which are based on real events).
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
"If bees were to disappear from the face of the Earth, serial killers would run rampant and destroy all of mankind within five years!"
You can read about this scary prediction HERE!
As well, Einstein also said that bees would develop artificial intelligence surpassing that of all Mankind's computer power by 2012, whereupon the price of a barrel of honey would surpass the price of a barrel of oil! Honey? You think I jest?
Do the math! It already IS more expensive than oil! Scary!
He also said that Windows would utterly annihilate Linux and other silly systems such as Apple by 2015.
Damn! That Einstein was one smart guy!
No Pinoqachole imbibing for Einstein!
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- aqk
F U
Congratulations on telling us something we learned in third-grade biology, Sherlock.
It's a well-known fact that after a serial killer dispatches a victim, they return to their hive.
They then perform a dance to indicate to the other serial killers where they killed their victim, and where the best serial-killer victims may be found.
Scientists can easily identify a serial killer by the characteristic dance they perform.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
I think there's some good reasons. A lot of serial killers probably have some kind of split personality thing going on; many are considered by those who know them to be very sociable and friendly, for example, which doesn't mesh nicely with being a multiple murderer. To be successful you need to keep your "normal" life completely separate from your "killer" life. I wouldn't pick someone at the local store where I do most of my shopping for example, because then when I go there in future I'll be reminded of the fun I had (assuming killing people causes pleasant feelings in me) and it'll be harder to contain the urge to do it again right now, rather than somewhere safe after careful planning.
Then there's the obvious problems with e.g. murdering your neighbour. Even if you're not a suspect, the police are almost guaranteed to want to interview you in case you heard anything, which means you have to lie about what you were doing at the time of the murder. Even if you're pretty confident that you'll be able to pull it off, that's still a huge risk that's almost certainly not necessary.
The most logical thing to do is to commit the crimes as far away from your home and work as possible. Of course, this causes its own problems: if you're spotted it'll be harder to explain why you were so far from home (especially if you're spotted at multiple locations); and the unfamiliar environment makes it more risky for you.
So even though serial killers may be well aware that they're leaving a bubble around their "normal" life which has the potential to expose them, not doing so is even riskier.
Bees do forage near the hive. Why anyone believes they don't is a mystery. Perhaps they have never had a beehive near their house.