Bees

Cool Idea: Using Bees to Find Land Mines

The European Union is sponsoring research by Nikola Kezic, a Croatian researcher, into using bees to detect landmines, and that's pretty cool.

His team has been working in a net tent filled with the insects and several feeding posts containing a sugar solution -- some of which contain traces of TNT. The bees -- which have already been trained to associate food with the smell of TNT -- gather mainly at those feeding posts containing TNT. The movements of the bees are tracked from afar using thermal cameras. Bees have the advantage of being extremely small and so don't run the risk of setting off the explosives in the same way that trained mammals such as dogs or rats do.

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Justin Green

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