Honeybees could be a tracer of landmines

This little creature is amazing, everything about its would have benefits for the welfare of human life, from its use as a medicine to cure various diseases up to detect landmines.

Regardless of the laser light that illuminates their body, the honeybees continue to fly around a pasture at the U.S. military base. Every 26 seconds, the green light is emitted by Lidar (sophisticated radar type that scanning the movement of honey bees). With the antenna that makes it capable of sniffing equivalent with the bloodhound dog, the bees followed an invisible chemical trail. Their have learned to associate the smell with their favorite food (the sweet liquid sugar).

A beekeeeper holds honeybees that are 
helping researchers at Sandia National 
Laboratories and the University of Montana 
determine whether foraging bees can 
detect buried landmines. In the foreground 
are two unfused antitank mines. (Picture from:  
http://www.sandia.gov/)

The smell of explosives guiding the worker bees to the other bees crowd which have first arrived. This time no one eats sugar, but bees keep visiting that point. Lidar on the computer screen, the crowd looks like a bunch of bees point. In the crowd, buried in the ground, there are anti-tank mines. "That was my eureka moment," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a research professor in the Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana. "If I see the bees which is found a landmines."

Bromenshenk, in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. Department of Energy, which is conducted experiments on the ability of bees to sniff out land mines. Even the research that had begun four decades earlier. Tests have been conducted in mid-2004 proved that bees can detect explosives in landmines locations that have been deactivated.

Initialy the Bromenshenk's research is intended to discover other benefits of the honeybees as environmental sensors that can detect particles of biological and chemical materials, including pollutants and explosives. The Honeybees chosen because it resembles like the flying dust wiper. The bee's body was covered in branching hair that is electrically charged static. When flying, they collect various environmental particles and bring it back to the nest.

Honeybees forage near a sugar-water feeder doped with explosives simulants, part of bee-training experiments at Sandia National Laboratories. (Picture from: http://www.sandia.gov/)

The entomologists at the University of Montana began studying bees and their nest since the mid-1970s. Initial research is conducted to know the environmental impact of the development which is developed into detection of dangerous chemicals, carcinogenic waste, to radioactive substances.

Nikola Kezic, a honeybees behavior experts from Zagreb University, also developed the research with the young researchers group in the green pasture that fenced with the acacia tree lines, where they trained the honeybees to identify the smell of food with TNT explosives.

"Our basic conclusion is the bees can detect the target, and we are very satisfied with the result," said Kezic, who led the experiment. This study is part of Tiramisu, a program sponsored by the European Union to detect land mines in the region at a cost of millions of euros.

In that experiment, Kezic and his team prepared a number of locations around the net dining tent contains honey bees, but only a few points that have TNT particles. The training method is done by bees to associate the smell of explosives with food, apparently successfully. "The point of feeding sugar solution containing TNT offered it as a gift," said Kezic. "They can find food in the bowl." Where the bees swarming around the bowl of sugar solution with the TNT smell, instead the bowl with another smell. "To train bees to track and sniff the explosives smell, is not difficult. The problem is to train a colony that contains thousands of bees," said Kezic.

The University of Montana scientists are also working with the Croatian researchers, to examines the impact of the explosion of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia. "To our knowledge, no other technology that has equivalent sensitivity of bees in search of mines or unexploded bombs," he said. "The honeybees are also safer to use because they will not trigger the mines like a human or a dog." *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | UM | SANDIA | TJANDRA DEWI | KORAN TEMPO 4238]

Note: This blog can be accessed via your smart phone.