The latest in fashion for bees this summer – a high-tech tracking backpack – also may help find millions of landmines scattered throughout the world.
If honeybees can be trained to seek the chemical components of explosives, the ability to track bees and analyze their hives could help pinpoint landmines or unexploded ammunition on firing ranges or old battlefields.
Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have modified commercially available radio-frequency tags for bees to "wear" so they can be identified. Special electronics and software also designed by Pacific Northwest are mounted on man-made beehives to "read" the identification of each bee from the tiny tags.
Researches hope that while bees are out foraging for pollen they’ll also pick up traces of the chemicals found in explosives that leak from landmines into soil and water.
"Bees are like flying dust mops. Wherever they go, they pick up dust, airborne chemicals and other samples," said Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the Arial, Helveticaity of Montana, who is coordinating this project. Bromenshenk has pooled resources from three federal agencies and three national laboratories to conduct this research, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense.
In a field test in May, several bees were outfitted with the tags, each weighing less than a grain of rice. Pacific Northwest engineers determined that the radio-frequency fields didn’t interfere with bee activity, but that the tags should be made smaller to lesson the impact on bees’ flight. Sokymat of Switzerland and its U.S. representative, North American Research Inc., are working to reduce the size of the tags.
A second field test at Sandia National Laboratories will study 50 tagged bees to determine the greatest distance bees can forage and how long it would take them to reach the landmines. In that test, a reader will track each time a bee leaves the hive, which way it is heading and when it returns. A system of analysis tools being developed by Sandia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Environmental Protection Agency will be installed in the hives to scan for chemicals such as TNT.
Contact: Marv Clement at (509) 375-2789
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