Bomb-Sniffing Bees?

The attempt to down an airline over Detroit, Mich., on Christmas Day with a chemical explosive strapped inside a passenger's underwear may spur new interest in honey bees as bomb-sniffing detectives.

It brings to mind scientist Robert Wingo's recent talk at UC Davis. Wingo, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico, spoke Oct. 21 on  "Explosives and Narcotics Detection by Monitoring of the Proboscis Extension Reflex in Apis mellifera (Honey Bee)."

Honey bees have a keen sense of smell that rivals that of dogs, Wingo told the capacity crowd in 357 Hutchison Hall.

He and his colleagues use the Pavlov reward method to train forager bees to detect explosives used in bombs.  Basically, the bees are harnessed inside a box and trained to "stick out their tongue" (proboscis) when they smell an explosive. The bees earlier associated the scent with the reward of sugar water. 

With the Pavlov dogs, it was hear the sound of the bell and salivate. With the Los Alamos bees: smell an explosive and stick out your tongue.

In a news release dated Nov. 27, 2006,  LANL news writer Todd Hanson wrote that this new technique "could become a leading tool in the fight against the use of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which present a critical vulnerability for American military troops abroad and is an emerging danger for civilians worldwide.”

“By studying bee behavior and testing and improving on technologies already on the market,” Hanson wrote, “Los Alamos scientists developed methods to harness the honey bee's exceptional olfactory sense where the bees' natural reaction to nectar, a proboscis extension reflex (sticking out their tongue), could be used to record an unmistakable response to a scent. Using Pavlovian training techniques common to bee research, they trained bees to give a positive detection response, via the proboscis extension reflex, when they were exposed to vapors from TNT, C4, TATP explosives and propellants.”

For more information, you can also listen to Wingo's interesting talk at UC Davis (Note: in this low-cost Webcast, the audio is better than the video).

Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, bomb-sniffing bees will be commonplace in airport security?

Will they take their place alongside bomb-sniffing dogs?

Meanwhile, the research continues...