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Honeybee behaviorist, Nikola Kezic, is training honeybees to locate concentrations of TNT which could help in the future to locate land-mines.
The process of training them is mixing tiny amounts of TNT into sugar water so that the bees associate TNT with food. The problem right now is training large numbers of bees as well as finding a way to get them to also ignore the flowers around them so that they all congregate on the land-mines.
“It is not a problem for a bee to learn the smell of an explosive, which it can then search,” says Kezic, “but training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”
http://grist.org/list/croatia-is-training-honeybees-to-locate-landmines/
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/national-world/article_9cc3b41f-65e6-5d84-81b2-12296c686b77.html
This is super cool! What do you think of all the bees that are dying now in what they think is due to pesticides and such being so widely used?
ReplyDeleteIt's actually down to a set of specific pesticides: BT crops, Round-up ready crops (glyphosate and particularly Roundup. There is not requirement for Monsanto to prove that their 'non-active' is actually not active and they are allowed to keep that ingredient secret) and there's also some stuff that is put on the seeds to protect them. All of these things damage insects directly as well as damaging their gut flora (which is something that has been linked to colony collapse syndrome).
DeleteWe are going to sorely regret it if we kill off all our bees.
Hope they soon cleanup all the landmines and let the bees get back to doing what they do best. (And only they can do)
ReplyDeleteI also hope that humanity grows out of the brutal stage soon.