Honey Bees Can Be Used As Biosensors: Here’s How – SlashGear

The research surrounding bees as biosensors is compelling. They can be leveraged to identify many chemical signatures, and the training timeline from start to finish takes less than an hour. A network of colonies (as many as 15 or more at a time) can be “conditioned in less than three days in open field settings,” according to the Bromenshenk group’s findings.

Bees are self-sufficient, as well. After employing any particular bee in detection duties (for a few days at a time), it is returned to the hive, where it will reintegrate into its daily life. Bees used in bomb, chemical, and other detection services can feed themselves once returned to the hive, and they don’t get distracted in the same way that dogs do. Likewise, there are many reports of inaccuracies among drug-sniffing dogs. Most troubling, it appears that drug sniffer teams are even less accurate regarding minority groups, leading to many false positives. Among bees, however, large groups of biosensing bees are used as a redundancy measure to confirm findings, and handlers who might sway the animals simply aren’t a part of the process.

Furthermore, tests have noted bees’ ability in “free-flying” environments (rather than laboratory settings) that have successfully identified buried mines and monitored chemical pollution levels. All this suggests that bees may be even more valuable than we have yet to discover.