Bees in a Box Buzz Bombs - Threats Watch.

About a decade ago, scientists at a national laboratory, in partnership with the University of Montana, were working on a project to “re-train” bees to respond to the chemical signature of chemical and biological weapons. These were the days between the first War in the Persian Gulf and our current battles against terrorism. The concept was to replace the bees’ reactions to pheromones and have them instead, “make a bee line” to the chemical or biological weapons. Suspecting that Hussein had his chemical and biological weapons in underground bunkers to avoid detection by inspectors, the idea was to send a swarm of specially trained bees to locate the sites.

In an outgrowth of this earlier research University of Montana researchers demonstrated the use of insects to detect pollution and land mines . A related program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), demonstrated that bees were trained in less than two hours using sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion...