A Croatian Professor Nikola Kezic, has discovered a way to train Honey Bee's to search out Landmines
The amazing thing is that he can train a couple of Hives holding thousands of Bees in three days
He places a hive at night close to a field where landmines are buried, and as soon as the sun comes up, hundreds of bees fly out and literally swarm, dropping to the ground, and exactly cover just the area where a land mine is buried.
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Each hive has enough bees to be able to cover and find 5 or 6 land mines within an hour.
The patches of bees hugging the ground are then photographed where possible. The photos allow human sappers to move in the following day to defuse the landmine, or blow it up using a rifle shot.
Sounds incredible dos'nt it? The Bees are trained for three days, maximum,......Now for how its done.
It seems that Honey Bees have an excellent sense of smell (I did'nt know that)
The Professor takes two hives and places them them in a large closed tent or hangar type of room.
Here he mixes up a synthetic food laced with Gelignite or a similar explosive, which he spreads upon the ground, covering a few area's, each about the size of a saucer in area.
As soon a it gets light, out fly the Bees looking for 'food', of course they only find it in small circular patches painted on the ground.
Within 2 or 3days, once they associate the food with the smell of explosives, they are ready to be put in the field for Mine hunting the following day. Amazing!
The downside is that within 2 days.....the Honey Bees, retrain themselves. So that more and more go off and search for food in their normal way....
...never having found any food where Land mines are.
