Swarm of protection-UM scientists working on plan to use bees to sniff out land mines

Homeland security may one day be entrusted to battalions of honeybees. Scoff if you like, but the last laugh could be on you because University of Montana scientists have perfected their technique of training the humble nectar-seeking insects into a squadron of landmine detectors.

By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian

Odd as it may sound, honeybees are actually easier to train, harder working and more accurate than professional bomb-sniffing dogs, said Jerry Bromenshenk, who has been studying bees as pollution sensors and environmental sentinels for the past 30 years.

http://beekeeper.dbs.umt.edu/bees/

"What makes them so effective is that they have a very refined sense of smell," Bromenshenk said. Not only do they live in packs of thousands and cover more ground more rapidly than dogs, but bees also learn their new task in just a few days.

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University of Montana scientists Jerry Bromenshenk and Colin Henderson will give a public talk titled "Using Honey Bees to Find Land Mines and Revitalize Agriculture in War Torn Countries," at 12:10 p.m. Thursday Sept. 26 in room 348 of the Science Complex at UM.

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The first step in the process is to get the bees distracted from the food they are foraging for in the wild by offering them easy-to-find food.

Then, like Pavlov and his dogs, Bromenshenk’s bees learn to seek out a particular odor such as anthrax or in the case of landmines the chemical 2,4-DNT, by getting more enticing food for successfully finding it and hovering over it.

When the bees zoom in on the odor, they get treated to their version of a gourmet meal – a sweet syrupy sugar water concoction.

With the help of UM scientist Colin Henderson, who conditions the bees to a certain odor, and UM software expert Robert Seccomb, who makes it possible to track the tiny flyers, Bromenshenk’s bees are creating a buzz among the science and military crowd.

For the past two years the bees have been busy finding simulated landmines that smell like the real thing in rigorous testing for a private company. Each time, the test results have come back with remarkable grades: The bees are getting A’s by a panel of objective judges who say the are reliably and effectively seeking and detecting the target.

In fact they bees have pulled in almost perfect scores every time, Henderson said.

Video footage provided by the scientists shows the bees triumphing in earlier detection tests taken in an undisclosed location on a Missoula-area street.

Using computer technology that identifies and tracks all moving objects with red light, and turns all other elements into black and white images, the bees clearly show off their swarming talents when called to duty.

In the film, the bee’s hive is placed 75 feet from a road. In each test trial, the bees launc into a flying frenzy over test vehicle’s that have an odor of something they have been trained to detect. The vehicles without the odor get no attention; nary a fly-by from honeybee crew.

Although that the bees have proven their talents to scientists beyond the UM campus, they have yet to put to test in a life and death scenario, Bromenshenk said. Still, the results prove there endless opportunities for bees to find work, Bromenshenk and Henderson said.

The beauty of the bee, Henderson said, is that "they are a wide-ranging insect that’s been domesticated and comes home every night."

Because they are so easily conditioned, there’s every reason to believe they could be particularly useful sniffing out would-be drug smugglers at national borders, or finding specific kinds of environmental pollution, or disease pathogens, Bromenshenk said.

"We know the bees can sense vapors at levels dogs can’t get to," Bromenshenk said. "If they can smell it, they will be as good or better than dogs at finding it."

Exciting as the prospect may be, the scientists said they will keep their research focused on detecting landmines because the need for safe detection is tremendous.

According to statistics provided by the United Nations, there are 110 million unexploded land mines worldwide. Each year roughly 26,000 people are maimed or killed from these hidden bombs.

"It’s a huge, huge problem," Bromenshenk said. "Not only the risk to people who are doing the demining work and to the people who live in those areas, but these landmines take good agricultural lands out of production. People starve because of this problem."

If they are to use bees to release those landmine locked fields and keep people safe, researchers must develop a way to track the hardworking honeybees over long distances, and to help beekeepers around the world learn the techniques to condition their bees to find the bombs.

As has been the case for years, the scientists are funded mostly by federal and private grants, which will help with their current research in developing laser technology for bee tracking, but won’t support their desire to reach across the oceans. That, said Bromenshenk, will take some well-funded helping hands.

"We need help with this transition," Bromenshenk said. "We need a humanitarian group to step forward help train local bee keepers."

Despite any skepticism, Bromenshenk he has ultimate faith in the ability of the average sugar-loving honeybee to make this world a better, healthier place.

"The first step in restoring agriculture in worn-torn countries is to locate and remove mines, and other chemical biological warfare agents," he said. "The second step is to bring back agriculture. In both instances honeybees can play a critical role."

Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at [email protected].

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