The BeeHolder, July 2009

Essex beekeepers had an interesting talk in April. It was given by Mathilde Briens, who is the Research and Development Manager of Inscentinel Ltd., a private company based at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire.

Mathilde is an environmental scientist and grew up in an amateur beekeeping family in Normandy. She worked in a bee research lab. in France collaborating with Rothamsted Research. From this came the idea of using honeybees as sniffer bees and Inscentinel Ltd was set up in 2003.

Sniffer bees are used in much the same way as sniffer dogs except that their training takes less than one hour. They are trained by *Pavlovian conditioned reflexes. The bees are given a taste of sugar at the same time as being exposed to the scent that is to be detected, whether it be explosives, drugs, money, moulds in foodstuffs and now even dry rot in woods is being detected.

The bees are given five lots of training each lasting five minutes and then they are ready for use. In the prototype equipment three conditioned bees were put in cages in a box with their heads projecting into a tube through which the air from the object being tested would pass. An infra-red camera was fitted to the box which would detect the bees' tongues coming out if the scent to which they had been conditioned was present. This would be picked up by the software on a computer. The bees are used for only two days after which they are returned to their hive, after being marked so that they would not be used again.

Bees can be conditioned to more than one scent but a recent development is equipment which will, house 36 bees in six groups of six so that each group can be trained on a different scent or scents. Instead of an infra-red camera a beam of light is now being used and the breaking of the beam by tongues can be detected. I should add that an advantage of using sniffer bees is that because of the short training/conditioning time operators do not have to take bees with them and can use local sources thus overcoming any import restrictions in other countries.

* Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849 - 1936), Russian physiologist and experimental psychologist. For his research on the nature of digestion he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1904. He is best known for his research on conditioned reflexes in animals, principally his experiments with dogs whereby he fed dogs and rang a bell at the same time so that they associated the bell ringing with food. When he rang a bell after the dogs had been conditioned it caused the dogs to salivate in the absence of food.

Based upon a report by Nobby Clark in Essex Beekeeper june 2009 with Inscential pictures added