Nature To Provide Uncle Sam
With The Ultimate Spy

By Al Colombo

In early 1998, society thought it amazing that a spy plane no bigger than 6 inches long with video cameras could exist for aerial surveillance of people, places and things.[1] In the near future, however, the military establishment intends to perform a similar task using the global positioning system (GPS) and honey bees.

According to Paul Stone, writer for the American Forces Press Service, Washington, D.C., the Pentagon inends to equip honey bees with remote transmitters. The mission: turn animals and insects into information collectors; more immediate, to detect dangerous land mines.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a rather intriguing project where bees will be monitored as they fly over land and return to the hive. The object is to monitor returning bees for the chemical signatures common to explosives.

"DoD, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is in the midst of a three-year study to determine whether honeybees, equipped with tiny radio frequency tags, can help detect land mines. But as Alan Rudolph quickly pointed out, the current research with honeybees is part of a larger research study of possible military-related uses for crustaceans, insects and reptiles."[2]

DARPA, engineers, and scientists from various research & development concerns in the United States are working under a $3 million program to develop tiny radio tags that will be fastened to the backs of 50 bees. The hive will then be placed in a minefield. The purpose of the test is to see if bees can be used to collect information at a remote location. The radio transmitters being used are only half the size of a common grain of rice.

Thoroughly computer driven--and using special chemical sensors inside the bee hive, the system will track each radio-equipped bee so that when a target chemical is detected, the computer system can determine that specific bee's physical route using stored GPS information.

"Sandia National Laboratory, near Albuquerque, N.M., is conducting a sort of basic training for the bees this summer. The goal is for the bees to recognize the smell of TNT and associate it with food. The explosive routinely seeps from land mines and can be found on surrounding plant life," said Stone.[2]

In the recent past, bees have been used to locate pollutants and harmful chemicals in the environment. The Pentagon has hopes that the same technology will enable military personnel to determine the location of chemical and biological agents as well. For more information on DoD plans to use bees and other creatures from the animal and insect kingdoms, go to: href="http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/bees/creatures.html.

Copyright©1999 Allan B. Colombo