Bee Sensor System Concept

Inscentinel Ltd. is developing a unique sensor system which utilises trained honey bees (Apis mellifera) to detect trace vapours. The fundamental science is simple: honeybees have extremely sensitive olfactory and they can be trained. For more information about how we train the sniffer bees, please refer to the sniffer bees link on the side.

Training a single honey bee is fun but training hundreds or thousands of bees is not. We know that to use honey bees in a real application we have to develop an easy-to-use method. Over many years of creative thinking and development, the Bee Sensor System created at Inscentinel. It combines the ease-of-use of a machine and the sensitivity of a biosensor.

The system is built on a cycle of 5 components

1. Bee hives
2. Bee holders
3. Automatic loading
4. Automatic training
5. Detector

A case scenerio below illustrate how an airport can make use of our system

An airport wants to use the Bee Sensor System. A security team then sets up a Bee Room in the airport to house our system. Every day, bees are collected from bee hives and are taken to the bee training room. These bees will then be loaded automatically into bee holders using the automatic bee loading unit. Once loaded, the honey bees are trained to target chemical compounds using the automatic training unit. Once trained, the bees will be despatched to checkpoints around the airport. The operators can now load the trained bees into their handheld detector (Vasor136) and begin searching. After their period of duty, the bees are returned to the hive.

Our prototype (Vasor136) has been tested against a IMS detector (Ion-mobility spectrometer) and successfully detected traces of explosives (Semtex and TNT) when the IMS detector failed. There is a huge potential for this technology. We are actively seeking partnerships to develop the final engineering prototype.

The principal components of system have been covered in patent filings, most of which have now been granted.

 

Advantage of the Bee Sensor System

 

1. Sensitivity

Bees have extremely sensitive olfaction which can reliably detect low parts per trillion. That is far more sensitive than most electronic devices and is relatively affordable.

2. Specific

An explosives dog is trained to around 9 target compounds. Therefore, it cannot indicate the identity of the compound/s it discovers.

In contrast, our bees are specfically trained to one substance. In a detector with cassettes of bees, we are able to indicate the substance on detected.

3. Flexibility

The speed of training is so fast and easy that a security company can provide trained bees according to the need. At times of heightened security, the number of trained bees on duty in an airport can be increased to meet the requirement.

The short time it takes to train a bees means a rapid reponses to new threats is possible.

4. High throughput

Bees respond in a matter of seconds. The Prosboscis Extention Reflex (PER) is almost instantenous upon the detection of a target odour.