Honeybees join the bomb squad The latest advance in bomb-sniffing technology relies on simple devices — honeybees. "Oh, yeah, there is a laugh factor there," says entomologist Timothy Haarmann of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory. "We walk into a room with security experts and say, 'We use bees,' so they have to shift gears." But with defense researchers at places such as the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency focusing on anti-terrorism measures, scientists are looking at nature's native soldiers, bees and wasps, to augment dogs widely used for bomb detection. "Honeybees are as good as dogs," Haarmann says. The trick, it turns out, is training the little critters to detect bomb scents. Some bees, exposed to the scents of bomb ingredients and rewarded with sugar water, get it right away. Others wash out, a surprise given that insects are seen as automatons because their behavior is so uniform, Haarmann says. So far, his team has trained bees to pick up the scent with their antennae and then flick their proboscises — a tubular feeding organ that extends from the mouth — when exposed to TNT, howitzer propellant and liquid-explosives ingredients at a level in the air of a few parts per trillion. Bees are natural-born sniffers, antennae sensing pollen in the wind and tracking it down to the flowers that are a food source for their hives. From the outside, a bee bomb-detection unit in practice would look like a plain box with a few air holes, perhaps stationed outside an airplane entrance ramp or train platform. Strapped into straw-like tubes within the box, a sensing device already manufactured by the British firm Inscentinel Ltd., rows of bees would be exposed to puffs of air, constantly checking for faint bomb smells. A video camera tied to pattern-recognition software would signal when the bees suddenly start waving their proboscises in unison. An open-air application with released bees may be used to detect land mines. Analyzing where bees cluster using a laser device reveals the presence of mines in U.S. Army-funded field tests, says entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana-Missoula. Other research, Bromenshenk says, finds that bee behavior changes in the presence of toxic airborne chemicals. Wasps, genetic cousins to bees, also have been proposed for bomb-sniffing duty. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Georgia last year unveiled a "wasp hound" device that relies on five strapped-in wasps to sniff out danger. Insect sniffers may have uses in areas such as food quality, counterfeit-goods smuggling and even in detecting drug smugglers. A colleague of Haarmann's, Los Alamos biochemist Kirsten McCabe, has trained bees to sniff out cocaine and methamphetamine. "The really nifty thing is we are allowing Mother Nature to do the heavy lifting," Haarmann says. The recent publication of the honeybee genome in the journal Nature showed that bees have about five times more smell-related genes than flies do. "I guess we got lucky, we picked the right insect," Bromenshenk says. "They are amazing critters." Enlarge Los Alamos National Labratory Honeybees are strapped into tubes within a sensing device. Trained to be sensitive to materials used in explosive devices, the bees' reactions are captured by a camera and pattern-recognition software.