Drug smuggling may ‘bee’ no longer

Honey bees benefit humanity by producing delicious honey that we can spread on our toast. This sweet honey arouses sensory receptors on our taste buds, and causes signals to be sent to the brain to induce feelings of pleasure and delight. However, is producing honey the only useful function of bees?

Most certainly not. As surprising as it sounds, bees are on the way to becoming national detectives. Inscentinel Ltd, a small company in Harpenden, near Luton, is proposing to use honeybees, Apis mellifera, as “sniffer bees”. Solving illegal drug crime, identifying dangerous explosives and even benefiting medicine: all new abilities that bees would be trained in.

Drug smuggling is a huge problem amplified in airports such as those in Britain, in which thousands of people everyday move through their terminals. Consequently, worldwide teams of sniffer dogs are used to detect illegal substances, which is expensive and involves a lengthy training process. Insecentinel believe that a viable solution to the growing problem of concealed cocaine, hidden heroin and masked MDMA may come from training the humble (not bumble) honey bee.

A bee becomes a sniffer bee by Pavlovian conditioning: associating a smell with food, a reward. To condition a bee they are exposed to the target odour, for example cocaine, and then rewarded with a sugar solution. Six presentations and six rewards are required to train the bee and from then on when a bee detects the odour (cocaine) it expects a reward (the sugar solution) and so extends its proboscis (tongue).

The bees are then stored in specialised holders which secure the bee in place and capture information regarding the response, by detecting when a proboscis is extended. As a result, it can be identified whether the bee has been exposed to drugs. The protocol would involving conditioning different bees to different drugs and bringing a group to suspect piece of baggage. If a bee sticks out their tongue, it would suggest presence of the particular drug which the bee had been conditioned to identify.

Honey bees are particularly suited to this role as they contain large number of ‘smell’ receptors: 170 compared to the 62 in mosquitoes and 79 in the geneticist’s favourite, _Drosophila melanogaster_ (common fruit fly). Furthermore, bees have excellent memories and hence can be trained very quickly (more so than dogs). Therefore, training can be done just before a “shift” and efficiently within the holder. This heightened sense of smell, coupled with quick training times and low costs makes sniffer bees a very viable option compared to the traditional use of dogs.

Are bees the future in detecting drug crime? It certainly seems hopeful, but more work is yet to be done to evaluate the practicality of the idea. If it were to be successful, however, I guess you could call it a ‘sting operation’…