Scientists have found that honey bees are more efficient and effective than sniffer dogs at detecting bombs. Bees are cheaper to train, taking only six seconds to learn to identify explosives compared to six months for dogs. They are also less risky to use as they can be contained in an unmanned box and exposed to scents remotely. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has successfully trained bees to detect explosives and landmines with 95% accuracy, higher than the 71% rate of sniffer dogs. Researchers are now working to enhance the bees' detection and memory capabilities to develop them as a bomb detection system.

1. Bomb Sniffing
Bees
By Claire Selbach

2. Sniffer dogs are great at detecting
bombs but have you ever
wondered if there is a better way
of doing this? Scientists have
been working with honey bees
and have found that they are
cheaper and easier to train than
dogs (Macrae 2013).

3. Experts believe that honey bees are a more efficient way of
detecting bombs because larger investigators, like rats or
dogs, can trigger an explosion with their weight (Anchorage
Daily News 2013). Unlike dogs, bees can multiply rapidly and
are easier to keep than dogs or other animals that have been
used to detect bombs. Not only are they cheaper than dogs,
they are at least as effective, if not more so. In Air Force
Research Laboratory tests of trained bees, the bees found
explosives 99 percent of the time. Another advantage of using
bees instead of dogs is that dogs need a person to lead or
guide them where as bees would be able to be held in a box
by robots, putting humans out of danger (Healy 2012).

4. Ivan Hoo, Inscentinel’s chief executive (Inscentinel is a
firm based at Rothamsted Experiemental Station in
Hertordshire. They specialise in the development of
insect olfaction technologies), says that while a sniffer
dog can take six months to train, the most adaptable
insects can take as little as six seconds to learn to make
a beeline for explosives.

5. In 1999, The Defence Advanced Research Laboratory
(DARPA), set in motion a project called the Controlled
Biological and Biomimetic Systems to examine organisms
from three different perspectives.
Part of that project involved fitting fifty bees with fifty radio-
frequency (RF) trackers no larger than a grain of rice. By
tracking the bees within a designated area and using special
sensors placed in the hives, it was hoped that the information
when combined with chemical analysis, could help to identify
the location of land mines.
It has been found that associating the smell of bomb
ingredients with sugar water causes the bees to extend their
proboscis – a tubular feeding organ that extends from their
mouth, as if they were about to extract sweet nectar from a
flower, when they smell explosives.

6. The success of the program which had a 95%
accuracy rate, compared to the 71% rate of bomb
sniffing dogs, has opened up the prospect of using
bees to detect Improvised Explosive Devices
(IEDs); suicide bombers, biological weapons and
eventually diseases and cancers in people. (MEA-
MFT.org, Elizabeth Batt)

7. The Defence Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA) is
also funding another project called the Stealthy Insect
Sensor. According to Tim Haarmann, principle investigator
for the project, the honey bees have a sense of smell that
rivals that of dogs. Applications for the honey bees include
the detection of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which
are a major threat to the U.S. military abroad.
A honey bee bomb detection unit would look like a simple
box stationed outside airport security or a train platform.
Inside the box, bees would be strapped into tubes and
exposed to puffs of air where they could constantly check
for the faint scent of a bomb. A video camera linked to
pattern-recognition software would alert authorities when
the bees started waving their proboscises.

8. Scientists are currently
studying the proteins in the
smarter bees to determine if
there are ways to improve the
bee’s ability to detect, be
trained and retain long term
memory.

9. THE END