Honeybees As Land Mine Detectors?

.c The Associated Press

 By LINDA ASHTON

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) -- Honeybees equipped with radio tags no larger than a
grain of rice may one day be used to detect antipersonnel land mines on
battlefields and elsewhere.

As farfetched as it might seem, a collaborative project seeks to train and
track entire colonies of bees that may be conditioned to prefer something
other than honey, such as TNT, the primary component of land mines.

Ultimately, it may be possible to carry a hive to a site and release the
bees
to search for explosives or other things, such as methamphetamine-making
ingredients or nuclear waste, said Ron Gilbert, who works on electronic
systems at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory here.

``This system is not unique for land mines,'' he said.

The project, led by University of Montana entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk,
depends on several factors -- particularly whether bees can smell and be
taught to find TNT.

``It's amazing what you can train a bee to do,'' said UM postgraduate
student
Bob Seccomb, who took part in a media demonstration with the bees. ``We've
got them flying through mazes.''

The Red Cross estimates there are 80 million to 120 million land mines in 70
countries around the world and that 60 people a day are killed or maimed by
buried mines. In some developing countries, thousands of acres of productive
land are unusable because they are death traps.

If the bees can indeed be trained to seek out explosives, the next step is
to
find a way to keep track of them.

That's where the radio tags come in. Several years ago, PNNL developed a
first generation of radio-frequency tags for the garment industry to track
inventory. The tags are similar to the microchips implanted by veterinarians
as permanent identification for cats and dogs.

The researchers brought some 20,000 bees in two hives to Richland for three
days of tag testing, which ended May 22.

UM student Jason Volkman carefully glued the tiny tags to the bees. To make
them easier to work with, he chills the bees in a college dormitory-style
refrigerator for four minutes, then attaches the tags to the bees' abdomens
with tweezers.

The tags have a 10-character code that identifies each bee individually. The
tags are read by sensitive instruments attached to a portable hive which
records when the bees leave to forage, the direction they go and when they
return.

A special spectrometer would be installed in the hive to ``sniff'' the bees
for the presence of TNT residue.

Bromenshenk has characterized the bees as ``flying dust mops,'' picking up
samples everywhere they go. Land mines leak small amounts of explosives into
nearby soil and water, and the TNT residue eventually makes its way into
some
plants.

In the tag tests, researchers learned that the bees were not dissuaded from
returning to the hive by the radio-tag reading equipment, Gilbert said.

They also found that the 27-milligram tags they planned on using were a
little too heavy for the bees; 25 mg is better.

``We know how to make them lighter,'' he said.

The Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also
are
part of the project, paid for by the federal Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency.

AP-NY-05-31-99 1202EDT