According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB), in the six months from October 2017 through March of 2018, 934 pounds of narcotics were seized coming into the U.S. from overseas. The U.S. has more than 300 ports of entry, making it impossible for officials to examine every person and package that enters the country for drugs. As a result, researchers are constantly looking for new techniques to detect drugs. You’ve heard about drug sniffing dogs, but what about drug sniffing honey bees?
Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany have trained honey bees to tell the difference between heroin and cocaine. They exposed the bees to the scent of heroin while applying small electric shocks, and the researchers discovered that the insects quickly associated the smell with punishment. They then exhibited learned “avoidance” behavior, meaning they fled from the source of the odor.
The bee researchers were allowed to use heroin, cocaine, amphetamine, and cannabis that had been seized by the Forensic Science Institute of the German state of Hesse and the Police Laboratory for Criminal Technology. Honey bees sense smell with their antennae, and odors are translated into electrical signals. As a result, their sensitivity to drugs could be measured by attaching the antennae to electrodes. They were placed in a small chamber and the odor of a drug was piped in through an opening. When the bees got close to the source of the smell, they received a shock, which stopped when they flew in the opposite direction. Once the bees fled from the scent of drugs even without an electrical shock, they were deemed trained.
The hope is that bees will one day be able to replace drug sniffing dogs, but why is this necessary? It turns out that training dogs is expensive. In 2004, the average cost of a canine police program was over $55,000, and that amount has surely increased in the 14 years since. It can take several years before the human and canine pair are fully trained and comfortable with each other. Dogs also have a limited attention span, so for example you couldn’t search an entire airplane for drugs without letting the dog stop and rest. Another problem is that many of the drug dogs in service right now are trained to recognize marijuana, which as we know is in the process of becoming legal in many places. It’s not really possible to re-train a dog to not react to a certain drug, and it would take a lot of time and money to train a new generation of dogs. Finally, there is a concern with drug sniffing dogs that because they bond with their human handlers, they become attuned to their body language and can sometimes respond to the bias of the officer instead of the actual presence of drugs.
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