BrainStuff Classics: Can You Train a Bee?

brain Stuff, Lauren vogebam here. Back in two entomologists Joe Lewis and Jim Tomlinson joined in a project that for the first time uncovered the ability of an insect to learn through association. It was at the time not only novel, it was an out and out revelation. An insect, in this case, the parasitic wasp, which feeds on and eventually kills certain agricultural pests, could learn in a most basic

way I think Pavlov's dogs, except smaller and buzzier. From that study and other similar research by for example, ARPA, the U S Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we have spun forward to the point where honeybees now have successfully sniffed out long buried land mines in Croatia. That's a long way from some thirty years ago, when Louis and Tomlinson released their findings in Nature magazine, to

the astonishment of many. Louis said, you talk about training in insect period and you get the look the I start narrowing. It just doesn't make sense. So how did they start making sense of it? Let's talk about associate of learning. The whole idea behind this is fairly simple, even if no one dreamed decades ago that insects could do it. With pav Love's dogs, when an outside stimulus a bell is often sided, was associated with food, the

dogs salivated. The dogs learned intuitively that the bell meant food was coming for the Lewis Tumlinson wasps. Various odors that the wasps didn't normally recognize, like vanilla or chocolate, or mixed with something that was associated with the pests that these parasitic wasps were trying to make their hosts. After a very short time, the wasps associated the vanilla or whatever with the insects that they wanted to attack,

and thus would fly toward the odor. It took less than five minutes to train the wasps, which like bees and dogs, have all factory senses. Thousands of times more powerful than a humans. As the studies continued, new researchers linked the smell of various chemical compounds and explosives to food. Today, honey bee trained for just two days could associate the smell of explosives with food and seek out that smell too. Big advantages to training insects to track odors rather than

say a dog. They learn faster, and there's a lot more of them to teach. But releasing a swarm of wasps or bees onto a battlefield or even a now quiet meadow in Croatia that may be littered with minds has its challenges. Of course, tracking the insects is foremost among them. It's impossible, as Timlinson points out, to put ships on each of them, and you can't, as Louis says,

put Alisha on a bee. Still, scientists can trace the insects movements in at least small numbers through devices like drones and webcams, and something early researchers called a wasppound. Lewis's waspound, about the size of a large coin, contains five wasps, a tiny camera, and a computer fan that pulls air through a small hole in the bottom of the device. When the hound comes near the target, smell the wasps. Lewis says, cluster around that little hole, like

pigs to a trough. Another problem researchers face is scale. Training one wasp or one b at a time can be laborious. Scientists have come up with methods to train more than that, but insects, like people, learn at different rates, so mass learning is not as accurate. In addition, bad weather or anything that disrupts the insexibility to smell can cause difficulties. Research is continuing. Tomlinson and Lewis never envisioned

be snifficg out bombs. Tomlinson is a professor of entomology at Penn State and Lewis a retired fessor and a research entomologist with the U S Department of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia. They were looking for ways to control pests biologically rather than with pesticides, and in fact they were very successful at it. Along with UK scientist John Pickett, Lewis and Tomlinson won the two thousand eight Wolf Prize for Agriculture, considered by many as a type of Nobel Prize in

the field. From the official announcement, on the Wolf Foundation website. They were awarded the prize quote for their remarkable discoveries of mechanisms governing plant insect and plant plant interactions. Their scientific contributions on chemical ecology have fostered the development of integrated pest management and significantly advanced agricultural sustainability. Whether their work eventually will help form the basis of a widespread practical use of bees and wasps in sniffing out bombs

or drugs remains to be seen. Even they have some doubts. Tomlinson said, you can train insects to find a mine, that's not a problem. But then you release them into the field to find a mine. How do you track them unless someone comes up with a small chip so that you can track them with some electronic means. I don't see how in the world you can use them, and says Louis, to move it from the lab to the actual field, you have to scale it up and refine it. But we clearly can see that it can

be practical in development. It's technically feasible. It's all on valid science. The ability is there. It's about the demand for it and putting the infrastructure in place for that. Scientists have been trying to find ways to harness the remarkable power of smell for years. Bees, some believe, have such strong abilities that they can smell out illnesses, even cancer.

A Spanish designer went so far as developing a prototype bowl complete with honey bees that you can breathe into to see how the bees react as a sort of proto diagnosis, and tests are being done in California with cancer detecting dogs too. Today's episode is based on the article these are smart, but try training them at home on houstuffworks dot Com. Written by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is a production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com and is produced by Tyler

Playing and Ramsey Young. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.