IT HAS long been thought that bees could perform the same tasks as a sniffer dog, if only they could be readily trained. Now a consortium of UK companies thinks they have the answer: a bee “hotel” that turns resident insects into reliable sniffers.
Bees have a good sense of smell and are able to smell out explosives and the like. Unfortunately, it takes hours to hand train a bee to do such a task. So UK biotech firm worked with and to develop a gadget that trains groups of bees at a time.
Each group of bees is exposed to a variety of odours and rewarded with syrup when a particular odour is present. After a few hours they learn to associate the reward with that odour. “If a bee smells something it has been trained to detect it sticks its tongue out expecting food,” says Andrew Redman of Realise. This Pavlovian reflex can be detected using a beam of infrared light by the bee’s head which gets blocked by the insect’s tongue.
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“After a few hours, the bees learn to associate the syrup reward with the odour of explosives”
Once trained they are placed in an odour detector called a VASOR (Volatile Analysis by Specific Olfactory Recognition), which houses bees in individual compartments.
Inscentinel is currently testing the training device. As for the bees, they will typically spend only a couple of days on sniffer duty before being returned to the freedom of the hive, Redman says.
