Honeybees trained to detect land mines in Croatia

Croatian officials estimate around 90,000 land mines were scattered across more than 400 square miles during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s. Even now, people are still dying from the unexploded mines.

Nikola Kezic, an expert on the behavior of honeybees, and scientists from Zagreb University have trained bees to associate the smell of trinitrotoluene, or TNT, with sugar water at specific feeding stations.

Professor Mateja Janes told the Croatian Times that "eventually they come to associate the smell of any explosives with easy food and will literally make a bee line for them." Janes added that after years of refinement and training, the bees are faster and safer than sniffer dogs.

The bees have a nearly perfect sense of smell, and can detect flowers from up to 2.8 miles away, making them more effective than dogs, with the added benefit of not being heavy enough to detonate the device.

Janes plans to take the trained honeybees on a field exercise in the southern town of Benkovac, once the front line of clashes from 1991 to 1995. The bees will be followed by heat-seeking cameras to track their movements.

"We have heard that Americans were trying to develop something similar in a secret project, but seems we've developed it before them", Janes said.

The bomb-sniffing bees form one part of a multimillion-euro program, called "Tiramisu," sponsored by the EU to detect leftover land mines on the continent.