Training Bees to Find Dangerous Polluting Chemicals

University of Ghent, Belguim

Correspondent: Proffessor Jacobs and his student Isabelle work in a room specially
designed to trick honeybees into thinking its sun all day long. Here they’re
testing an ingenious way of training bees to find dangerous polluting
chemicals.

A Bee Movie

Prof Francisco Jacobs (University of Ghent): So I was having bees when I was
very young at 14 years old and I have learned from my father for it was a
family tradition. They can be used as detectors of the whole environment.
Our environment becomes more and more polluted we know that but at
this moment I think bees can be used as bio indicators.

Correspondent: If you feed bees a tiny amount to the pollutant we’re looking for
mixed them with pollen or nectar they’ll go foraging for pollen or nectar
but similarly contaminated.

Francisco: Now we are able to place such a bee hives in order to sense materials sub
sensors and those sub sensors can be detected by the bees if they’ve
learned it so you can use them for instance to detect landmines or
whatever you would like. The will remember that they were fed with
citrus and by this way they have learned very young already so you can
see the whole colony is learning as a population. So the next generation
will prefer already citrus.

Isabelle: We’re going to train them to a their food at a certain time. Now I will give
them food and we’ll see that they’ll a lot of this will come to the food.

Correspondent: Training bees isn’t difficult or lenient as a flight room.

Francisco: Building a bee flight room is rather easy. We had to make a place where it
is times, spaces at independent of the season. If you have a minimum
space of 2 meters by 2 meters, 2 meters high that’s enough for one
beehive. The most important thing is the kind of light, blue light and this is
very important especially this lights are fed a three phase system
furthermore you have to make sure that there is always a constant
temperature for verified degree. The humidity is a relation to get the bees
breathing to obtain brute inside of the hive.

Correspondent: The bees may be trained but how do you know they’ve actually
found what they’re looking for. You see they accumulate on a certain
place for instance for landmine they will look on the ground. No flowers
are there but they will detect and accumulate on the place of the landmine.

Correspondent: But what if the pollution is spread everywhere a minute diluted
quantities?

Franscisco: As bees have a radius an actual radius of 3 km becomes really a good
sampling method. You can take samples from the honey. We can take
samples from the pollen. We can even take samples of the adult bees and
samples from the larvae which we need like to measure DDT in Africa.
You start to collect for several months bring it to the lab where the
analyzers is carried out and then you have to result in a few months if you
like. It’s one of the easy to do so.