In
Croatia, unexploded mines dot the landscape and still kill people who
find them. But a new animal is being trained to locate them for us:
honeybees.
Nikola Kezic, an expert on the behavior of
honeybees, sat quietly together with a group of young researchers on a
recent day in a large net tent filled with the buzzing insects on a
grass field lined with acacia trees. The professor at Zagreb University
outlined the idea for the experiment: Bees have a perfect sense of smell
that can quickly detect the scent of the explosives. They are being
trained to identify their food with the scent of TNT.
“Our basic
conclusion is that the bees can clearly detect this target, and we are
very satisfied,” said Kezic, who leads a part of a larger
multimillion-euro program, called “Tiramisu,” sponsored by the EU to
detect land mines on the continent.
Several feeding points were
set up on the ground around the tent, but only a few have TNT particles
in them. The method of training the bees by authenticating the scent of
explosives with the food they eat appears to work: bees gather mainly at
the pots containing a sugar solution mixed with TNT, and not the ones
that have a different smell.
It may be quite some time before the experiment reaches
actual land mines. Training a few bees is completely different from
training an entire colony.
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