Abuzz with possibility

For the past few years, the news has been filled with a drumbeat of doom over the fate of the honeybee. Thanks largely to a mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the number of hives has been falling, with catastrophic implications for the species — and the agricultural system.

So a recent announcement that honey production is booming in the United Kingdom, as amateur beekeepers flock to the honeybee's rescue by setting up hives, is especially cheering — for the honeybee is not just an essential part of the pollination system, it is a marvel of nature, not to mention one of the most sophisticated creatures on the planet.

Bees have been around for 110 million years or so but it was only a couple of thousand years ago that we started to grasp their potential for helping humanity. The ancient Mayans were among the first, harnessing the stingless Middle American honeybee for agriculture.

Their shamans revered the creatures, believing that each one had a soul. The Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch dedicated his life to deciphering how honeybees communicate, discovering that by dancing, vertically, in the dark, they signal the exact location of nectar, pollen, water and tree resin or other important information.

He also found that bees can count to five and trained them to visit feeding stations at specific periods of the day. Bees, he found, have a memory for time and space, using landmarks such as trees, rock formations or barns to guide themselves. This system — and the ability to count — is employed when deciding on where to build a new hive.

Bees also rely on scent to perform daily activities. A worker bee's head has two antennae loaded with 3,000 sensory organs. Its ability to distinguish more than 170 odours in the wild is vital for smelling nectar, pollen, water, tree resin and pheromones.

Today nearly 20,000 species of bees are recognised pollinators, contributing to the health and wellbeing of the majority of the 235,000 species of flowering plants on the planet.

Since one species of Italian honeybee, Apis mellifera, was conscripted to pollinate foods, cotton, alfalfa and clover for the beef and dairy industries 150 years ago, it has helped generate more than 91 billion kilograms per year worldwide.

Yet the honeybee's importance goes far beyond agriculture. For example, there is the lucrative, burgeoning business of api-therapy. This field of pharmaceutical science uses the anti-inflammatory properties of melittin and adolapin in bee venom, along with apamin, to improve the nerve transmission, bringing relief to sufferers of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, tendonitis and other autoimmune diseases.

For 15 years, scientists have been training bees to help us in other ways. The work on conditioned reflexes by another Nobel laureate, Ivan Pavlov, has taught bees to respond to more than 60 odours, ranging from methamphetamine to TNT, enriched uranium to tuberculosis.

To identify a scent, the chemicals are mixed into a sugary liquid that bees are rewarded with, laced with a hit of caffeine. The process is repeated up to five times, at which point the bees associate the smell with the food. Thereafter, when a bee encounters a desirable scent, its reflexes cause it to extend its proboscis or tongue to lap up the nectar. Inevitably, this has caught the attention of the security industry.

Soon, bees could be deployed in war zones, airports, stations, ports, sports arenas, food-service companies and medical offices. The economics certainly make sense: Whereas sniffer dogs are accurate about 71 per cent of the time and require at least three months' training, honeybees are accurate 98 per cent of the time and require less than ten minutes' training. Moreover, they can detect explosives or narcotics in the presence of potentially interfering agents such as lotions, motor oil or insect repellent.

There are also humanitarian uses for sniffer bees. The Red Cross estimates that between 80 million and 120 million landmines exist in 70 countries, maiming 22,000 people (mostly children) each year. A system devised by the University of Montana counters this by fitting honeybees with miniature microchips.

As the bees fly around, the electrostatic charge from their bodies attracts TNT residue, the explosive component from landmines. Once they return to the hive, this can be detected and a scan of the chip will reveal the appropriate location. These techniques could also be applied to the health system.

Honeybees are already being used as early detectors of lung and skin cancers, diabetes and TB, and to monitor fertility cycles and confirm pregnancies. Patients breathe into a glass diagnostic tool; when the trained bees detect any of the diseases or the hormones, they move towards the tubes that lead closer to the breath.

Given these benefits, it is tragic that hundreds of billions of honeybees are dying worldwide due to CCD, which many scientists blame on a group of pesticides called neonictinoids. The humble honeybee must be saved at all costs.