IEDs vs Bees

The wonderful Christina Lamb has been writing in The Sunday Times about how bees could help identify IEDs and save the lives of American and British soldiers fighting the Taliban. But ‘the logistics of carrying bees inside army vehicles moving around Afghanistan have proved unworkable’, she says.

I wonder why. If I weren’t in Cyprus now, reading The Sunday Times online in a dust-storm between the mosaics of Paphos and the Sahara, I think I could find a range of ancient accounts of soldiers fighting with bees, from the venomous poison-flower-eating killer bees of the Black Sea deployed against the Romans by Mithradates to the heated earthenware pots of bees hurled into rivals tents by military geniuses whose names I cannot quite now remember but could find, I think, back home.

Christina is writing of highly trained bees whose small hairs, normally used to detect pollen, can apparently be used to detect any scent. The IED-seeking bees will stick out their tongue when the explosive chemical is found. Add a simple detecting machine with a monitor that registers a signal when the bee-tongue is stuck out and all will be solved.

The soldiers would still, of course, have to travel about with the bees. This may be a difficult duty for those not familiar with our furry flying friends, one which the  modern city man soldier may indeed find harder than the peasant militias of old.

 Or perhaps the logistics have genuinely ‘proved unworkable’. 

 

Comments

[Adrienne Mayor]

Not only were furious bees, wasps, and hornets deployed as weapons in antiquity (see "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs"), but US troops in the 1960s encountered Vietcong boobytraps containing giant, ferocious Asian bees (Apis dorsata). The Pentagon began developing these various bee and other insect reconnaissance devices during the Vietnam War. An early prototype was a handheld box of bees, whose alarm pheromones signaled a swarming attack. Another device was supposed to amplify the sound emitted by assassin bugs when they sensed the body heat of approaching Vietcong.