'Sniffer bees' can detect evidence of explosives, TB, food spoilage, and other stuff.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. This is very cool. A U.K. biotech firm is harnessing the olfactory ability of bees for trace vapour detection. Apparently they can reveal evidence of spoiled food, explosive chemicals, and disease, among other things.

Just the name of the company alone - Inscentinel - makes me want to work with these guys (didn't Agent Smith use inscentinels in the first Matrix?)

Sniffing the evidence. From the Inscentinel site: "The science is based on the acute olfactory sense of honeybees. Bees are trained to recognise particular odours (e.g. that of explosives) and associate that smell with a food reward. When the bees detect the odour, they extend their tongue or proboscis (the Proboscis Extension Reflex or PER) in expectation of food. Honeybees make excellent detectors because they are inexpensive, quick to train (a few minutes per bee) and have extremely low limits of detection (odours can be detected to parts per trillion levels).

"Our system has the potential to be deployed rapidly and quickly retargetted to new compounds when required. There is a large scope of possible applications ranging from explosives and drug detection to the diagnosis of tuberculosis and food spoilage.... Bees are not harmed undertaking their sniffing tasks... only healthy bees work effectively."

These are early days, so on their web site I didn't see success stories or published studies demonstrating the effectiveness of their system. The company is currently seeking commercial partners.

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[art painting]

Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.