According to the Red Cross, there are at least 80 million landmines deployed around the world, now scientists
are working on a new approach to finding hidden landmines — using bees. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse
of the Planet presented by Dupont.
“The way we’re gonna use bees to find the landmines is first by training them, similar to training a dog.”
Phil Rodacy is a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“What you do is you get the bees to associate the smell of an explosive with a food source. So we’ll take a small
feeder, put some sugar water in it, and then around that feeder we’ll put some crystals of the explosives that
we’re interested in having the bees go out and find, like maybe TNT. As the bees feed on that sugar water,
they’re smelling the explosive cause they all have a unique odor. We then take that feeder away from the bees
and they still are associating that smell with a food source so then they’ll go out into a field and they’ll look for
that smell and they’ll kind of congregate there, thinking that they’re gonna find food. Well, if we can watch the
bees, and see where they go, we can find out where a potential mine area would be.”
Using a field of landmines that have been defused, the scientists are learning how much of the TNT leaks out
into the soil, how much gets into plants, and how much of the explosive the bees carry back to their hives. By
spot-checking hives for explosive residue, scientists may be able to home in on locations with buried mines.
Rodacy says the beauty of bees as landmine detectors is that they already live all over the world, and unlike
people, they can’t set off a landmine.
“About every fifteen minutes someone is either killed or injured by stepping on a landmine, so it’s something
that’s killing people on a daily basis.”
Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support
provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.