Training a bee for sniffing
Our "sniffer bees" are honey bees trained to recognise a specific odour. Similar to training a dog, bees are trained through Pavlovian conditioning - a simple association of a smell with a food reward.
The insect is exposed to the odour in a controlled pulse and simultaneously rewarded with sugar solution. After 5 odour presentations the bee is trained. When the bee detects the odour it expects a food reward and extends its tongue (proboscis). This response is a reflex action (Proboscis extension Reflex, PER) and is not consciously controlled by the bee.
A simplified version of laboratory hand-training procedure. For more elaborate procedures there are plenty of articles.
1. Place a bee in a clean airflow
2. Introduce target odour for a period of 6 seconds
3. After 3 seconds of exposure to the target odour, the antenna is touched with sucrose solution to elicit a proboscis extension and the bee is allowed to feed on the sucrose solution for the remaining 3 seconds of the odour presentation. Of course, the sucrose solution is moved to below the bee's mouthparts once the proboscis is extended to allow feeding.
4. The whole process takes one minute. To reinforce the memory, the steps are repeated for 5 cycles.
5. Now trained, the bees are ready to sniff out terrorists.
Sense of honeybees
In the natural world, honey bees show a remarkable ability to locate flowers to source nectar and pollen. Foraging worker bees have an acute memory of a variety of scents to help them locate food sources. Throughout its life, a worker honey bee is constantly adapting, modifying and learning associations between odours and the environment.
Individual sensors densely cover each of the bees two antennae. The sensors are connected to nerve cells which are integrated in the olfactory lobe of the insect's head. Odour recognition is by a combination of specific molecular binding and signal processing.
Insect olfaction and the bees' capabilities represent an effective, sensitive, ready-made sensing system that can be tapped into using innovative technology and protocols. Inscentinel uses bees as sensitive, vapour detecting "micromachines".
