Sent by Jerry Bromenshenk for posting to BEE-L

	Subject:  Bees and Detection of Harmful Things
	 
	Regarding the press release on work at LANL, John Edwards said :
"...this DARPA-funded scam has been going on for much too long. It is
not ever going to be an effective tool, and ... populated areas of
Iraq/Afghan. now have explosives residues on their surfaces."  And Peter
Borst agreed.
	 
	I'm sorry to see John Edwards and Peter Borst drawing
conclusions based on false assumptions, with no specific information.
They usually speak from a knowledge base.
	 
	This is the same type of logic that Mark Winston used some years
ago when he said that there was no need for a better method to find
landmines -- farmers knew where they were.  
	 
	As someone pointed out, if that was the case, how do you explain
the 20,000+ people hurt or maimed each year by these devices -- 50% of
whom are children?  Are the farmers committing suicide by running out
into the fields and throwing themselves on mines?  If you wonder about
the need for better landmine detection technologies, ask anyone in the
Mine Action Centers in countries all across the world, or Noel Mulliner
from the Landmine Program of the United Nations.
	 
	Ok, to the extent that I am free to talk about our work and the
work of others using bees to find things:
	 
	1.  John is correct in saying many areas are grossly
contaminated -- but we and others have hard data that says bees sort
this out, ignoring elevated background levels, showing the real things
of interest.  That's one of the reasons for so much research -- lives
are at or will be at stake; false hits, and even worse, missed devices
would be a big problem.  Knowing the exact limitations of a bee-based
detection system is critical.  I fully anticipate that I will be the
first person to walk a minefield cleared by bees - so I take this
seriously.
	 
	2. The main hold up has not been the ability of bees to find
things or the number of false hits, it has been our inability to find
the bees at a safe standoff distance.  That was resolved last summer.
We now, with our colleagues at Montana State, have portable,
battery-powered lasers than can precisely locate (map) bees across large
areas.  The lasers key on the flash from the bees' wings.  As such, the
laser sees bees and only bees.
	 
	3.  The United Nations and the Canadian government underwrote a
new, large scale, proof-of-concept trial for landmine detection last
summer -- the U.N. and others from the landmine detection community see
this as possibly the biggest advance in the last 15 years, a technology
that has application in over 60 countries and that could reduce the time
needed to clear mines from 500 years down to 50-100.  
	 
	Unfortunately, the trial was put on hold because of concerns
about sharing the technology with other countries (technology export).
	 
	4.  We have published successful landmine detection trials,
including the use of lasers to map bees across minefields -- type in my
name or that of Joe Shaw (the lead developer of the laser systems) to
pull up peer-reviewed articles from the internet.
	 
	5.  Dee Lusby is correct, we can easily transfer this capability
to train bees for uses such as the detection of drugs, meth-labs, and
even dead bodies -- we are currently working with the U.S. Department of
Justice on these applications.  If it has an odor, we can probably train
bees to seek it out. And the LANL folks have a similar technology using
bees in a box as a 'sensor' that can be carried to whatever you want to
scan -- in fact, LANL is using a technology used in the U.K. and
developed by a company called Inscentinel.
	 
	6.  We also now know that we can use the same conditioning
systems to change the pollination efficacy of bees on crops (the
Russians had it right, you can train bees to crops).
	 
	7.  The portable lasers should provide a revolutionary tool for
optimizing pollination -- we can now examine how forager bees discover
fields, disperse relative to hive number and placement -- we're
negotiating projects with seed companies.  Questions about how to
isolate hybrid seed fields, best strategies for hive placement,
interplay between different pollinator species can all be visualized,
mapping each and every bees across space and through time.
	 
	8.  We also use bees to warn of releases of poisonous gases
(e.g., Homeland Security) -- using the sounds that bee colonies produce
to provide an alert in 30 seconds or less - and the sounds tell us what
type of chemical was released.
	 
	9.  This same sonic technology is showing remarkable promise for
being able to scan bee colonies to detect and characterize the levels of
infestation/infection of foul brood, varroa mites, africanized bees,
etc.  In fact, we think that this could dramatically improve bee
management and are looking for investors to get this system out the door
and into the hands of beekeepers by next summer.
	 
	10.  All of the hive security systems that we can now offer the
beekeeping industry are a spinoff of our military studies.
	 
	11.  By next summer we anticipate having satellite-ready pallets
that can report basic metrics back to the beekeeper from hundreds of
miles away -- things like hive weight, rainfall, etc.  Consider the cost
benefits of not having to drive to every yard to check on things --
never having colonies starve without your knowledge, knowing when nectar
flows have begun in time to get equipment on the hives, not sending
trucks to pick up crops that didn't materialized because of localized
drought...
	 
	We have a reasonably affordable satellite uplink system that
covers all of North America and most of the developed areas of the world
(i.e., Europe, parts of Australia, much of S. America).  Our cost
estimates are in the ballpark of $5 month per yard.
	 
	The biggest problem with our military projects is that the
military is not particularly interested in agriculture, even as a
strategic resource.  Our challenge now is how to get these technologies
out to the beekeeping industry, where we anticipate seeing changes that
will parallel those of cereal grains (e.g., yield mapping), bringing the
advantages of precision agriculture and cost reductions to commercial
beekeeping.
	 
	I fully anticipate that within a year or two we will be able to
make a big difference in the global landmine problem, saving thousands
of lives.  I also think we have the technology to rapidly improve
beekeeping efficiency for large beekeeping operations.  Putting these
systems in place is the challenge, especially if people dismiss the
concepts based on opinions, not facts.  
	 
	Beekeepers haven't cornered the market on making statements that
aren't true -- we've had reviewers say bees won't be able to find things
because they fly in tear drop formations, that bees will sting everyone
in the area, that bees are in short supply in areas of the world where
we know there are more bees than in the U.S.,  that bees have a poor
sense of smell, that bees can only detect pheromones and floral scents,
etc.
	 
	Jerry
	 
	J.J. Bromenshenk
	 
	P.S.  I will be presenting an overview of bees as sensors at the
national meeting of the entomological society of america, next week, in
Indiana.
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 


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