Honey bees sniff-out landmines at the University of Montana

Researchers in the US are combining LIDAR and a honey bee’s finely tuned sense of smell to locate buried land mines.

Honey bees could soon take the human risk out of finding landmines thanks to research being carried out in the US. The team trains the bees to sniff-out the explosives found in landmines and uses LIDAR to track their progress in-flight.

Dogs are currently used to locate mines but the animal and its handler are heavy enough to explode a mine placing them in constant danger. Bees on the other hand do not explode the mines, do not require a handler and can be trained in a couple of days to pick up the scent of the explosive in the landmine.

Jerry Bromenshenk and his colleagues from the University of Montana at Missoula are responsible for training the bees. "By injecting trace amounts of target chemical into feeders, the foraging bees seek sources of food with the same smell," explain the team in its paper. "Bees can be trained in one or two days to seek out buried explosives because of their high odor sensitivity in the low parts per trillion range."

Full Story: http://optics.org/articles/news/11/8/8/1