Sniffer Bees Trained to hunt down Terrorists

Meet the latest weapon in the war on terror - the humble honey bee.

Specially trained sniffer honey bees may be coming to an airport near you soon, thanks to a successful new prototype that is about the size of a handheld vacuum cleaner. The Vasor136, developed by Hertfordshire Company Inscentinel, and partially funded by the Home Office OSCT (Office for Security and Counter Terrorism), is creating a buzz after successful tests with the government.

Training the bees is simply a matter of bribing them with sugary treats. Mathilde Briens, Head of R&D at Inscentinel, explains: "It all revolves around training and reward, a classical Pavlovian conditioning of the honeybees. We expose the bees to the odour, say the smell of TNT explosive, for a few seconds and simultaneously give the bees a sugar syrup reward. After 4 or 5 exposures the bees associate the odour with the reward..."

The device holds six cassettes of six bees. The Female Worker bees are kept in optimum conditions in a filtered airstream until they reach the environment to be tested, e.g. near a suspected car bomb, or luggage at Heathrow