Tuesday 11 October 2011

Sniffer Bees!!!!!!!

I have just caught wind of the most interesting thing to do with bees ever!! People are now training bees to sniff out drugs and explosives instead of dogs. There are a couple of good reasons why to replace the dogs with bees because bees only take 10 minutes to be trained unlike 3-4 months for dogs. But the biggest reason is bees have a far superior sense of smell - they can sniff out the equivalent of a grain of sand in a swimming pool! The way it works is 3 or 4 bees are strapped into these little pods with a fan blowing air from in front of them. When someone walks past at say the airport with what the bees have been trained to smell, say cannabis, then they will stick out their proboscis. When they stick out their proboscis a camera/sensor will pick it up and sound the alarm. They are trained by pumping in the smell of sugar with the smell they want to train them for at the same time. Then they just pump in the smell they want them to pick up on its own and they stick out their proboscis in anticipation of food because they relate it to the sugar. I think it is a genius idea. What do you think??? It's going to change the way they find terrorists, IED's and drug dealers/smugglers etc but not only that, the medical sector too!!!

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