Where Have All the Honeybees Gone?

Now I know where all the honeybees have gone - drafted into the Army!!!

Sniffer bees with a nose for explosives are set to make a major breakthrough in the war on terror. An extraordinary invention by a small British company is being praised by American scientists who have been testing it.

Researchers at Inscentinel Ltd, which has just three employees at its Harpenden, Herts, HQ, have developed an amazing "sniffer box" to harness the bees' incredible sense of smell. Now Inscentinel is set to cash in when its box full of computer technology that turns honeybees into bomb detectors goes into mass production.

They trained the bees to only extend the proboscis when smelling a particular explosive, conditioning them by giving them a reward of sugared water when they responded correctly.

DARPA has a billion dollar a year budget and hands out millions for 'off-the-wall' ideas that could turn into major defence projects. They asked the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has 9,000 employees and an annual budget of $2.2 billion, to test Inscentinel's ideas. And Los Alamos thinks the sniffer bees are one of DARPA's most successful investments.

Like all the best projects at the New Mexico lab where the first A-bomb was developed, the bee squad has a code-name - SISP, for Stealthy Insect Sensor Project. Inscentinel showed the Los Alamos scientists that the bees can be trained to sniff out anything from home-made fertilizer bombs, through demolition dynamite to C-4 plastic explosives.

Unlike sniffer dogs which require three months training, it takes 10 minutes to train the bees. ...Read more here...