Current Event 4: Humble Honey Bee Security

Humble Honey Bee Helps National Security
Oct 14th 2010
Science Articles
Anna Khot

As much as humble bees like to work, they have a new career but they aren’t just making honey; they are trained to tell the evidences of drugs and explosive materials. By being the sniffer bees, honeybee (Apis Mellifera) can be the solution for UK’s answer towards the “Combat National Security” investigating drugs and threats. Since Honey bees have precise and acute olfactory senses, they can be thought as sensitive creatures. By using this kind of techniques, the bees can associate odor with a prize. Many Britain scientists train this species to detect the odors. Odors if you haven’t notice are smells or reaction caused by chemical compounds. The developed technology that UK formed has been upgraded by Inscentinel Ltd, a company based at Rothamsted Research. The group studies potential applications such as detection of drugs and materials which are very explosive. According to their information, bees can detect the harms in airport and the military as well as detecting food quality control. Dr Nesbit, a scientists at Inscentinel Ltd responses that “Bees are at least as good as sniffer dogs but are cheaper and faster to train, and available in much larger numbers.”

While training the honey bees, scientists show them to learn and memories. They are loaded in the separate holders where they sit comfortably and exposed to an odor which passes over them in short pulses. When exposing, the bees are given a drop of sugar syrup which they stick their tongue out to receive, the experiment concludes the first term that it is a classical “Pavlovian” conditioning method. The whole training (two and eight rounds) completes in few hours and reflexes lasting for days. While the experiment occurs, scientists tell the proboscis of each bee sticking out to anticipate receiving rewards. The proboscis gives a “signal that the scientists use to determine successful conditioning.” When records come out, the scientists determine to find records. The detecting experiments last for 6 seconds. We now know that instead of sniffing wild dogs, we can use stinging calm bees instead.

Bibilography: (style changed)

Khot, Anna. "Honey Bee Detectives." Humble Honey Bee Helping National Security.
N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2010. .