CAN BEES BE TRAINED TO SMELL CORONA VIRUS?

CAN BEES BE TRAINED TO SMELL CORONA VIRUS?

Subject : Environment

Context : Recent research by startup InsectSense and WageningenBioveterinary Research in the Netherlands suggests bees can be trained to smell and detect coronavirus.

Concept :

• The coronavirus, like other diseases, causes metabolic changes in the body that causes a smell.
• Bees can be trained within minutes to recognize the scent of samples infected with SARS-CoV-2.
• Bees can detect volatiles with a sensitivity of parts per trillion. For example, they find a flower a few kilometres away.
• Bees, like dogs, can learn to detect volatiles and odors, but with just a few minutes of training.

Pavlovian conditioning method

• The bees were trained to detect SARS-CoV-2 infected samples in a Pavlovian conditioning method.
• Each time the bees were exposed to the scent from an infected sample, they received a sugar water solution reward. The bees extended their tongues to collect the sugar water solution.
• By repeating this action several times, the bees associated the sugar reward with the scent as the stimulus.
• With this repeated conditioning, soon enough bees started extending their tongues out for the scent alone, with no reward offered as a follow-up. A trained bee can detect an infected sample within a few seconds.