Bee-rilliant Idea

Bees are fascinating creatures. They make honey and help pollinate crops and flowers, giving a great example of hard work. Soon researchers hope to add yet another amazing quality to that list: by training bees’ acute sense of smell, Colin Henderson, an LDS professor of biology at the University of Montana and other researchers hope to use bees to help detect and clear landmines from many areas of the world.

“We use a food reward to train honeybees,” Henderson says. This trains the bees to associate the smell of the chemical they are looking for with the food used in the training. “It’s the same way we train a dog.”

While not utilized just yet, Henderson says he hopes this is the year that the project can finally be put to use. “We’ve spent the last several years developing the technology to make it deployable.”

According to Henderson, Jerry Bromenshenk, one of the lead researchers, had been working with bees as a way to monitor the environment for years when the Department of Defense started looking for experimental ways to find landmines. Henderson was gradually pulled into the work after that. “I started by helping with analysis,” he says.

The ultimate goal is to improve landmine detection and cleanup. Currently, landmines pollute ground in more than seventy countries around the world as relics from the Cold War and World War II, not to mention guerilla warfare currently taking place in many countries. This means people are unable to use what would be viable farmland and other natural resources. Current cleanup projects use dogs on long leashes to detect the mines, but the rate of cleanup is slow as well as dangerous for both the dog and its trainer.

With the technology being developed by Henderson and Bromenshenk, there will be much less danger because bees are not heavy enough to detonate landmines, and cleanup rates will increase significantly because bees are so much more efficient. Henderson says they will be able to clear land five to ten times faster than the current rate with dog scouts.

Henderson says that part of what makes the project so successful is the biology of the honeybee. “The neat thing about honeybees is they’re finely-tuned for working in a world of chemicals and scents,” he says.

While Henderson and Bromenshenk have been working on this project for about nine years, they aren’t limiting their research to just finding landmines. “It’s turned into a ‘what can we do next?’ problem to solve,” Henderson says. The project also has abilities to improve crop usage, pollination and seed production. There is always more to be done. “There’s still a lot of discovery to be made in the world. I’m always surprised at what we discover,” he says.

Henderson finds being involved in something like this to be very rewarding. “I’m kind of proud to be involved in it.”