Training the bee “nose”

A few weeks ago I was hiking in Velebit National Park, Croatia. My sister and I had roadtripped there in a cheap $10/day rental car from the capital city of Zagreb to climb peaks, trail run and get muddy (a trail runner’s favorite thing to do). We drove up to the National Park visitor center to get a trail map and were given a map similar to this one. In red are areas with suspected land mines.

I’d never been given a land-mine map in prep for hiking before. Most U.S. maps have warnings for more benign things like a dry spring or a sink hole. Here it seemed a bit more important to not venture off-trail.

The land mines in Croatia are relics of the Yugoslav wars that took place from 1991 – 1995. Twenty years later, land mines are still a danger to civilians and tourists in regions that, on the surface, appear to be recovered.

Who would expect a land mine in a place that looks like this?

The Croatian plan for land mine removal involves training honey bees to smell out mines. In many parts of Afghanistan, they use dogs. In Cambodia and Mozambique, they use giant rats (how giant? these rats are over 3 ft in length from nose-tip to tail-tip). I’ve seen trained dogs and trained rats but I had never heard of a trained insect. Can insects be trained?

Insects, apparently, can be trained and have been for a variety of purposes. Mosquitoes have been trained to change landing preferences when certain lands were paired with electric shock. Cockroaches have been trained to “carry” backpacks for search and rescue missions. Wasps have been trained to detect a variety of drugs and pathogens. Maybe it’s not surprising then that bees can sniff out mines.

It seems like scientists are getting good at training insects to find and do things. Now maybe we can work on the reverse: can we train mosquitoes to not find me?

Reblogged from my original post on the Read lab group page.