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Honeybees to be used to detect landmines

WASHINGTON: Scientists are investigating the keen noses of honeybees and other insects as a possible way to detect landmines, a remnant of war that kills thousands of people every year.

Honeybees have such an exquisite sense of smell that they can detect the vapor that wafts from the ground from the explosives in buried landmines. Traces of the chemicals are then carried by the bee back to its hive.

Jerry J Bromenshenk, speaking at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said on Monday that researchers now hope to use the honeybee to identify areas that have been mined and, perhaps, even pinpoint individual mines.

"Honeybees can pick up traces of all sorts of contaminants," said Bromenshenk, a researcher at the University of Montana in Missoula. "Our studies have shown that they can distinguish individual explosive compounds".

The trick, he said, is getting this information from the bees.

Under a contract with the US Army, Bromenshenk and a group of researchers have already shown that by putting sensors inside beehives they can tell if a bee foraging in the field has detected an explosive compound.

The next step is to follow the bee back to the place where it found the explosive.

Landmines left behind in abandoned battlefields are a major health threat in many countries of the world, said Regina Dugan of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

She said that more than 2 million landmines were left in Bosnia. In Cambodia, where war raged for years, one in every 236 civilians has been killed or wounded by a landmine. Thousands of people annually, in dozens of countries, fall victim to landmines, she said.

Bromenshenk said his group has developed tiny antennae that can be placed on individual bees, allowing them to be tracked electronically as far as 270 meters from the hive.