Introduction About Us Our Bees Applications Technology News Photos Contacts Rothamsted
Sign up to the free Inscentinel Newsletter
Inscentinel Ltd.
Rothamsted Research
Harpenden, Hertfordshire
AL5 2JQ, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1582 763133 (x 2713)
inscentinel@bbsrc.ac.uk
All information displayed in these
pages is confidential and should not
be used or duplicated without the
express permission of Inscentinel.
© Inscentinel 2002-2007
Inside Track: Harnessing the power of bees
February 21st, 2003: The Financial Times. By Adam Jones
A British company is looking to the insect world for help in tracking illegal substances, writes Adam Jones.
One of the greatest challenges facing any entrepreneur is scale. Something that looks compelling as a prototype may be impossible to reproduce profitably in bulk.
When your product consists of a team of immobilised bees trained to sniff out terrorist threats, the issue of scalability takes on new and surreal importance.
Bees are trained to respond to smells, in much the same way as Pavlov trained a dog to respond to a bell. Such is the odd challenge facing Insense, a British company that wants to rewrite the job description of the bee. In a laboratory in Hertfordshire, Insense scientists demonstrate how these insects can be used to detect dangerous or illicit materials such as explosives or smuggled tobacco.
A trained bee in a harness - its antennae the only things moving - is slotted into the chamber of a small scientific instrument. A scent is pumped in. On the instrument's crude black and white screen the instantaneous effect can be seen; the bee extends its proboscis like an unfolding penknife - a positive reading.
Insense does not identify the scent it was using but the test proves a general idea. Bees, Insense claims, can be conditioned to stick out their "tongues" in response to smells they would normally ignore. The training involves exposing the insects to the scent then rewarding them with sucrose solution.
After several repetitions of this sequence, a bee greets the scent with proboscis outstretched in anticipation. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov famously pulled off a similar trick with a dog, conditioning it to associate the ringing of a bell with food. So much for the theory - but can a drooling bee constitute a sound basis for a business ?
The chief executive of Insense is Professor Paul Davis, a former Unilever scientist. He was an architect of the Clearblue pregnancy test, and when the Anglo-Dutch consumer products group sought entrepreneurial projects to nurture in a business incubator, an idea put forward by Prof Davis was one of the few chosen.
The pregnancy test relied on antibodies detecting hormones in liquid. Prof Davis says : "I had always been thinking - what if you could have biological molecules that could detect things in air? We do it all the time with our noses. " After discussions with scientists from Rothamsted Research - the oldest active agricultural research station in the world and now, like Unilever, a shareholder in Insense - it was decided that bees were the best means of achieving this goal. Bees have a formidable sense of smell and are more hardy than other insects.
Prof Davis says bees offer significant advantages over sniffer dogs too, requiring a much briefer training period. "Because sniffer dogs are intelligent, complex beings, they get bored, they have off days and they are very difficult to control. In our systems bees aren't using intelligence, they are using reflex reaction."
The Inscentinel detectors that Insense is developing will rely on a cassette of about 20 bees, including spares. Their responses will be recorded in a software file that could be used in court cases against smugglers and terrorists. Prof Davis says the bees stay conditioned for several days.
After a tour of duty the cassette would be returned to Insense and the bees released back into the hive. Although the colonies used at the moment are confined to netted areas indoors - essential in winter - the aim is to allow the bees to roam outdoors as they please when they are off-duty.
Prof Davis insists that the bees are not harmed by the work and are accustomed to confined spaces. Some of those used in research have been tagged and followed after release. Insense says they are still flying a couple of weeks later and are not shunned by their colony. "We want to make it totally harmonious with the bees," says Prof Davis.