Ong's amazing ability

Honey bees are 'soldiers' that detect mines

In the world every month, hundreds of victims are killed or killed by mines and ERW. Therefore, demining has become a top priority. To accomplish this mission, the military often uses portable metal detectors. However, its reliability has not been as expected. That's why the Pentagon experts have the idea of ​​using . honey bees.

Since 1998, the US military has conducted two projects under the direction of Jerry Bromenshenk , a public researcher at the University of Montana, a project to detect and determine the location of antipersonnel mines. The remaining scheme aims to detect terrorist attacks. A special feature of the diaphragm is that their sense of smell is much more refined than that of a professional dog, but the ability to remember a large number of different smells is also strange. The bee is very easy to train to fly to a fragrant place, even if it has nothing to do with food. This teaching can be done in the laboratory, based on the reflex model of Russian physiologist Pavlov (1849 - 1936).

The experiment here is for bees to get used to an odor ( sugar juice for example ). Next, show the bee the smell and the bee's " sticking out" is like it prepares to eat when the food is delivered. This whole work took less than 10 seconds. The bee also has another good thing: Not only do you miss it a little bit, it once met, but it also conveys this awareness to the fellow. In other words, only one honey bee is taught, other honey bees exposed to it are also aware. And the US scientists have conducted training bees to recognize the smell of TNT, the main ingredients that make up explosive. At a training camp in Nouvedu state - Mexique (USA), a test was completed with increasing difficulty. The goal is to study the behavior of trained honey bees.

The first step is to place the beehives in a greenhouse with bleached TNT. Sensitive to the smell of this explosive, honey bees towards nectar have TNT infiltration. The next step is conducted outdoors. The mines are buried in the ground and the nearby flower plants absorb the vapor particles TNT. Yet even though the TNT vapor particles emanate from places far away from the beehive, honey bees go straight to the flower plants infected with TNT.

Scientists also discovered the use of bees to detect pathogens released into the air by terrorist attacks. This process selects on a forgotten event for physicists. The surface of an object when carrying has static charge because of friction with air molecules. This static charge attracts a part of the bee with light objects that carry opposite charges on the bee's flight path. For example, pollen seeds can be attracted by honey bees. So why aren't any pathogens suspended in the air attracted by bees? That is the hypothesis that scientists at the microbiological aerosol laboratory. To prove, they released a bee in an air stream carrying spores of hay bacilli and they found these germs 'stuck' to the body of the honey bee. From that data, scientists developed a mathematical model on the basis of its accumulation on the body of the honey bee. Scientists have just announced that they have come to the same result as bacteria dispersed into aerosols. But not only honey bees have attracted attention to the US military.

In the near future, the bee will be in the ' arsenal ' of the army, the police are like dogs, elephants, pigeons . Probably because the US has spent 25 million US dollars to study the honey bee with the nose hearing.

Bumblebee bee makes 'drug scout'

Sneaky drug traffickers and terrorists in the near future can face their rival rivals: The ' experts ' who bumblebuckle parasites are very good at detecting chemicals in the form of drugs and explosives. and plant diseases. Dubbed ' scouting ', about 5 bees will be locked in a special box called a portable chemical detector. They know how to react to the smells above, create body movements and activate the alarm system to manage them.

Glen Rains, a bioengineering engineer at the University of Georgia (USA), who co-invented the device, said: Famed for his precise smell, parasitic bees don't bite people and are as small as wing ants. . Researchers believe this bee is quite ideal for smelling bombs. Parasite bees need only be trained for 30 minutes and each time they spawn thousands of animals, it is not limited to try a ' scout ' supply.

' Scouting ' is a follow-up study of a parasitic beetle in Georgia, scientifically known as Microplitis croceipes, 100,000 times more powerful than the most powerful probe. inventor. In nature, these bees use their beards to find butterflies that specialize in perforating corn stalks. Bees will live parasites on butterflies, this host is also a place for them to lay eggs and raise their children. Later, the bee bites you and will eat the host meat, making the butterfly more weak and dead.

In the '70s of the last century, W. Joe Lewis, co-creator of' scouting burlap 'and expert on parasitic bees and colleagues discovered that the bumblebees found corn butter through a chemical. in the feces of butterflies. Later studies reveal that the bee's olfactory system is directly related to flavor entities, and they can learn to recognize some flavors from foods such as corn. Lewis himself soon realized that he could train them to identify certain smells. Knowing some smells in mammals is not strange to us, but with invertebrates . so new!

The principle of recognizing smells in bees is as follows: Normally in the box they crawl over and crawl slowly, but when they smell the smell they are trained to recognize, bumblebees like an animal that sees the smell of blood, they will go near the source, wait to be fed. An ultra-small camera monitors every bee's movement, transfers images to the computer for analysis and activation of the alarm system for 30 seconds. This project, if nothing changes can be widely applied in the next 5 to 10 years.

Le Dao & Nhat Long