The Ultimate Sting: Bees the Buzz in Landmine Detection

RICHLAND, Wash., April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Forget James Bond and his souped-up
BMW.  The newest high-tech agent in the world of international security could
be a honeybee.

Its mission?  To detect landmines.

Its modus operandi?  Tiny radio frequency tags.

Technology developed at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory is helping to determine if bees pass muster as secret agents in
the mission to find millions of landmines scattered worldwide.

Pacific Northwest engineers have modified commercially available
radio-frequency tags, which store information and can be used to track items
such as clothing, to serve as high-tech "backpacks" for bees.  Pacific
Northwest engineers also have designed special electronics and software for
radio-frequency devices that "read" information on the tags.  These devices
will be mounted to manmade beehives.

Used together, these technologies will track the movement of bees and test
their ability to detect minute amounts of explosives.  If bees can be
trained, they will be a means for locating landmines or unexploded ammunition
on firing ranges or old battlefields.

The University of Montana in Missoula is coordinating this project, which is
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research
and development organization for the Department of Defense. Dr. Jerry
Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the university, pooled resources from three
federal agencies and three national laboratories to conduct this research.

In a field test this spring, Pacific Northwest engineers and Bromenshenk's
research team will tag 50 bees in a controlled experiment.  Each tag will
store information used to identify a bee and will weigh less than a grain of
rice.

The RF tags and readers will allow researchers to track the movements of
individual bees.  For example, as a bee leaves for a day of pollen hunting,
it will fly out of the hive and trigger the reader.  The reader scans the tag
on each bee, then sends the bee's identification code, direction of flight
and the time to a modem.  The modem downloads the data to a central computer.
This process also will occur when a bee returns to the hive.

Then, a system of analysis tools being developed by Sandia National
Laboratories in New Mexico, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and
the Environmental Protection Agency will be installed inside the hives and
scan for chemicals found in explosives.  Together, the tracking information
and the analysis tools could help pinpoint landmine locations.

Researchers also will conduct a second field test to study how far bees
travel.  This information will allow researchers to determine the greatest
distance bees can forage and how long it takes them to reach the mines.

Pacific Northwest engineers developed a first generation of radio-frequency
tags in the early 1990s for the garment industry to track inventory.  Pacific
Northwest engineers are improving the storage and range reading capabilities
of the tags for national security applications.

Pacific Northwest is one of DOE's nine multiprogram national laboratories and
conducts research in the fields of environment, energy, health sciences and
national security.  Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, has operated Pacific
Northwest for DOE since 1965.

SOURCE  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

CO:  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

ST:  Washington

IN:  ARO ENV CPR

SU:

04/28/99 05:20 EDT http://www.prnewswire.com