Bees, Bomb Detectors?

Bees can be trained to detect bombs. Police and military personnel have been using dogs to sniff out explosives for decades. According to scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA), who have been working with honeybees since 1999, bees can actually challenge dogs when it comes to sense of smell. Those same, buzzing insects that seek out molecular hints of the pollen they use to make honey can just as easily detect other minute particles in the air, including traces of materials used to make bombs.

So how do you train them to respond to TNT the way they respond to pollen?The same way you train any animal to do almost anything: by associating a particular stimulus with a reward. With Pavlov's dog, associating the sound of a bell with the smell of food caused the dog to drool when the bell rang. With honeybees at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where researchers are conducting the most recent military studies with bees, associating the smell of bomb ingredients with sugar water causes the bees to extend their proboscis, as if they were about to extract sweet nectar from a flower, when they smell explosives. And it doesn't take very long. Bees who are going to get the association get it quickly, after only a few exposures to vaporized explosives ingredients followed by the sugar water.

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