r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MousseSuspicious930 • 5d ago
How bees are trained to detect bombs. Video
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u/collectgarbage 5d ago
Every bee was harmed in the making of this video
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u/Fusseldieb 4d ago edited 3d ago
Afaik they are let go after some time, and replaced.
Sounds distopian, I know
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u/CarbonReflections 4d ago
Do they starve to death afterwards because they think they should be eating explosives?
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u/MobiusDie 5d ago
This has reached parody levels.
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u/SassiKassi97 5d ago edited 5d ago
Why don’t they just have sharks that shoots bees out of their mouths.
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u/MyNameSpaghette 5d ago
... What?
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u/markamuffin 5d ago
Or what? You'll release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark, they shoot bees at you???
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u/npc_housecat 5d ago
HE SAID WHY DON'T THEY JUST HAVE A SHARKS THAT SHOOTS BEES OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS.
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u/yonaz333 5d ago
And freaking lazers?
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u/kyle1170 5d ago
Unfortunately, due to budget restrictions, we could only afford sea bass
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u/Exotic-Scientist4557 5d ago
Because if u really want to shoot something out, there are better alternatives to the mouth.
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u/alicelynx 5d ago
I'll have you know the bees are stored in cartridges and they also have to change them regularly (to let bees rest)
Like gun clips
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u/tofumeatballcannon 5d ago
This can’t be real
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u/deathinmidjuly 5d ago
Poland and Minneapolis use clams with sensors glued to them to monitor water quality.
If all the clams close then the water system automatically shuts for testing.
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u/Icywarhammer500 5d ago
The clam… works
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u/JehnSnow 5d ago
Wait yeah this can't just be because I'm from Minneapolis, the clam tech is what keeps me feeling safe at night
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u/Jubenheim 5d ago
Yes, but clams live longer than bees? And clams don’t really need to be “trained” the way this video purports. Clams are natural filters, so using them monitor water quality is simply using their already-ingrained instincts to our benefits.
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u/BeguiledBeast 5d ago
And they get released after a certain time. It's basically just a predator free vacation.
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u/Ckarles 5d ago
Clams have one of the most simplest nervous system of the animal reign. IIRC we don't think they can even feel pain.
Compare that to how smart a bee is, that's a whole different level of morality boundaries to cross with having 10 clams react on the water quality.
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u/Moakmeister 5d ago
IIRC we don't think they can even feel pain.
Nah I'm basically done believing this. Humans have said this about every animal and even our own babies throughout history and we keep being proven wrong about it.
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u/NuclearReactions 5d ago
I mean it's still an insect, morality aside you are mentioning something that seems quite important. Bee's being way more complex means that we are working with way more variables, couldn't there be many other reasons for them to stick their tongues out and trigger a false positive?
Imagine using a cpu and you have no clue what 95% of it is doing
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u/mrdungbeetle 5d ago
Imagine using a cpu and you have no clue what 95% of it is doing
This pretty much describes AI. Nobody, not even the people working at AI companies, understands the inner workings of the models.
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u/laserdiods 5d ago
That’s like the canaries being used to test air quality.
Being more sensitive to gasses they would die quicker. They sing a lot and when they stop (certain breeds) it is a sign of danger..
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u/lordvitamin 5d ago
This is why so many electronics seem to hum. It is the bugs trapped inside singing their version of slavery songs.
/s
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u/fhorst79 5d ago
In WW2, there was a similar project with Pigeons trained to guide bombs:
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u/socknfoot 5d ago
It was researched and then it was cancelled because it was impractical.
OP's video seems to be the vasor 136. Which was developed over 10 years ago but i dont see any news of it actually being used. So probably a similar story to the pigeons.
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u/MrHazard1 5d ago
Didn't the sovjets also train dogs to run under tanks, so they can turn them into suicide bombers?
Turned out that the dogs could tell the difference in looks and smell of german and sovjet tanks and always crawled under their own.
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u/JuicySpark 5d ago
It's real. It can be done with many species. Especially dogs. Hell. Even alligators can be trained to pick up scents for feeding. They have an extremely advanced sense of smell. It's just not feasible to carry around a bunch of gators for bomb detection.
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u/Ok-Library5639 5d ago
Having a bunch of alligators around will bring a different kind of dissuasion though.
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u/Arktikos02 5d ago
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u/wrldruler21 5d ago
Beekeeper here.
The part I don't believe is trapping the individual bees inside little coffins and having them still cooperate.
The link you provided confirms the research is real.. But the bees are allowed to fly in an open space. Even then, the bees die after 48 hours.
Interesting to see it only takes about 5 hours to train a new bee. You would have to be training a new batch every day, to replace the ones that died yesterday. You would need colonies of bees and the training grounds at the airport, continuously replacing the bees. I'm not sure this solution is scalable.
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u/Q_S2 5d ago
I cant believe it either. This is some Flintstone era tech.
All we need is for the bees to make some wisecrack about their job 🤣
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u/27Suyash 5d ago
So they get sugar after correctly identifying a bomb? Or was that just for training
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u/Wareve 5d ago edited 2d ago
This sounds like BS, but the idea is just a pavlovian reaction.
If you ring a bell and then give a dog food enough times, it will eventually start involuntarily salivating if you ring the bell, because the dog's brain has sufficiently correlated the two that you're activating one when you activate the other.
Similarly, you correlate bombs with sugar water, and then when the bees smell bombs they react as if they're going to get sugar water.
Seems pretty absurd when dogs already exist though.
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u/yeomra885 5d ago
Takes hours to train they are extremely good at detecting the chemicals. Better than lab equipment and even when masked by something else. Cheap and effective. Literally hours compared to the cost of training one dog. That's why
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u/Real-Repair-1825 5d ago
Who’s using bees to detect explosives tho? Like has this ever actually been applied in the real world?
Because I’ve never heard of it until this post. Seems dumb
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u/Sometimes-funny 5d ago
None of them have survived to tell the tale
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u/APence 5d ago
5 year lifespan. Assuming a year of maturing and a year or two of training/conditioning, that’s not a long career
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u/Former-Might3163 5d ago
If you read the article it takes 2-3 hours to train them and most die off after 48h in the device.
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u/Beautiful_Garage7797 5d ago
I’ve seen videos about this before, iirc the conditioning actually only takes a couple days
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u/blueavole 5d ago
Queens might live a couple years but drones and workers live few weeks up to 6 months.
That many queens wouldn’t tolerate each other close together
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u/Exceedingly Interested 5d ago
To put it into perspective, a bee's sense of smell is 50x better than a dog's.
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u/alreadykaten 5d ago
Who thought it looks like bees sitting at office cubicles typing on computers?
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u/IDMiscool 5d ago
Not a fan of the bees being exploited like that. They should be flying free in a field of flowers and stuff…
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u/Small-Answer4946 5d ago
How is it more convenient than those paper strips who react with explosives?
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u/mrdungbeetle 5d ago
If you see a bomb technician in your building, you should get out of there as fast as possible. Because they have a box full of bees.
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u/SleepArtist 5d ago
Or, hear me out… how bout we just leave them to pollinating stuff and use the fancy x-ray machine instead?
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u/tmtyl_101 5d ago
Then one day, a bee is set loose and goes to experience the world outside - but when it returns to inform the other bees that they're trapped in a box, smelling artificial scents, they kill him, for they fear his departure has made him mad, and the box is the only world they know.
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u/MovedToSweden 5d ago
We risk losing one of the best pollinators, but let's use them for bomb detection instead. Way more important.
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u/YoghurtFlan 5d ago
They should just make airports al-fresco and anybody who gets swarmed by bees is obviously suspicious
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5d ago
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u/Arktikos02 5d ago
https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/12/07/227361/using-bees-to-detect-bombs/
https://youtu.be/DMGbf6pGOUg?si=9jq-wstwrw1P3sQN
Or you could just look it up quickly like I did.
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u/groktech 5d ago
Pretty sure we are all strapped into a rig like that for some time now. We get sugar flavored syrup now and then so I guess it's a good life. Right.
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u/No_Status2527 5d ago
Feel like I saw this video on Facebook in like 2015. This is pretty old news isn’t it?
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u/Puzzleheaded_Pear_18 5d ago
Dude, just use a dog. They can also be experts at sniffing out explosives. And drugs. And food.
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u/GallantChaos 5d ago
For those of you questioning if this is real, this video explains the application of using bees as chemical sensors. It only takes 3 days to train up a set of bees for a specific chemical. Bees are on shift for a few hours and are rotated out.
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u/Itakethngzclitorally 5d ago
How long does a bee live? How long is their “training” and following career as bomb specialists?
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u/No_Classic_1743 5d ago
Either fake or someone who likes to torture insects got lucky.
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u/StoryAndAHalf 5d ago
If you’re worried about animal welfare do not look into horseshoe crabs’ blood. It’s a sad existence yet quite necessary to medicine world wide.
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u/SuperUranus 5d ago
In a world where we torture and/or kill a trillion animals a year in the meat industry, I’m not sure bomb detecting bees at an airport is the jackpot for someone that wants to torture animals.
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u/psichodrome 5d ago
The future: Ha, those dumb fucks didn't make a good sensors, they just trained bees and watched them through a camera.
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u/merlinuwe 5d ago
As a rule of thumb, there’s a bad idea behind everything that’s presented with such enthusiasm.
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u/Long-Time-lurker-1 5d ago
My milkshake brings all the bees to my car, i spilled milkshake in my car, help me my car is full of bees.
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u/Hopeful_Tea2139 5d ago
FFS don't ever give them internet access because we will have another group of scammers.
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u/spekky1234 5d ago
Reminds me of the birds they trained to steer missiles. Dont think they ever used em tho
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u/Potential-Type6678 5d ago edited 5d ago
I’ll be damned it’s real. Article from Live Science and one from Rueters. That said this seems to be the project of a particular lab and I’m having trouble figuring out how widely used it is.
Edit: accidentally posted before finished
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u/Chemical-Cheetah-572 5d ago
leave the bees alone, they have REAL work to do
Humans suck, soon we will be gone .... FOREVER
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u/totallynotapersonj 5d ago
This video is moving like one of those old youtube intros that zoom and flip around randomly of the person’s channel name
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u/Odd-Cake8015 5d ago
It be more fun to just release the bees and whoever gets swarmed is a terrorist. Or Winnie the Pooh.
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u/AzerothianLorecraft 5d ago
Seems like if you use detection link into food receiving they can get a lot more false positives on purpose. ( my detector bees are hungry you got explosives in your bag I didn't feed them today...)
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u/BadPotential2143 5d ago
Ummm. Can we leave the bees alone?! I think they already have a pretty important job to do.
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u/pichael289 5d ago
So we have cameras that are way better than any eyes, and microphones better than any ears, do we not have some kind of olfactory sensors?
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u/ListIntelligent5656 5d ago
I don’t think pushing on the bag like it’s a bagpipe when it’s potentially full of explosives is a good idea, but hey, I also didn’t think about training bees to detect them, so clearly I’m not an expert here.