Honeybees All the Buzz in Landmine Detection 

Breakthroughs Fall99

The latest in fashion for bees this summer—a high-tech tracking backpack—also may help find millions of landmines scattered throughout the world.

If honeybees can be trained to seek the chemical components of explosives, the ability to track bees and analyze their hives could help pinpoint landmines or unexploded ammunition on firing ranges or old battlefields.

Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have modified commercially available radio-frequency tags for bees to "wear" so they can be identified. Special electronics and software also designed by Pacific Northwest are mounted on man-made beehives to "read" the identification of each bee from the tiny tags.

Researchers hope that while bees are out foraging for pollen they’ll also pick up traces of the chemicals found in explosives that leak from landmines into soil and water.

"Bees are like flying dust mops. Wherever they go, they pick up dust, airborne chemicals and other samples," said Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the University of Montana, who is coordinating this project. Bromenshenk has pooled resources from three federal agencies and three national laboratories to conduct this research, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense.

In a field test in May, several bees were outfitted with the tags, each weighing less than a grain of rice. Pacific Northwest engineers determined that the radio-frequency fields didn’t interfere with bee activity, but that the tags should be made smaller to lessen the impact on bees’ flight. Sokymat of Switzerland and its U.S. representative, North American Research Inc., are working to reduce the size of the tags. 

A second field test at Sandia National Laboratories will study 50 tagged bees to determine the greatest distance bees can forage and how long it would take them to reach the landmines. In that test, a reader will track each time a bee leaves the hive, which way it is heading and when it returns. A system of analysis tools being developed by Sandia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Environmental Protection Agency will be installed in the hives to scan for chemicals such as TNT.

source: http://www.pnl.gov/breakthroughs/fall99/critical.html#bees 19jun03

The bee tag was developed for the military. It turns out some bees like nitrates such as those found around land mines. The idea was that as the bees arrive back into the hive, one could monitor the dance and determine approximately the range and bearing to the mine field. The tags a very small (about the size of a grain of rice), simple (a few bits of information), and light weight (tens of mg), but have a range of only a few cm. The concept has not been taken up commercially to my knowledge. Other technologies that we licensed to WaveID are now with Alien Technology. This was not one of them. The closest commercial supplier to these type of devices of Sokymat, but last I looked, they considerably were larger. 
Michael A. Lind Ph.D, PNNL 22jun03