How Beekeeping Can Improve Our Health And National Security!

Experienced beekeepers will know just how clever those busy bees really are! We are dependent on them for pollinating our crops and underpinning our agricultural systems. And as a by product of that, they provide us with honey to spread on our toast!
And whilst the benefits of honey are well known, enabling us to boost our immune system and fight off colds and sore throats, the honey bee is now being trained to detect both illness and threats to our national security.
A whole new field of medicine, apitherapy, is being developed, to use the properties of bee venom to help sufferers of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. The venom has anti-inflammatory properties which help improve the nerve transmission in of these patients.
And scientists have been taking advantage of the honeybee's exception ability to determine scents. Repeating the experiments of Ivan Pavlov and his work on conditioned reflex, they have taught bees to respond to over 60 different smells. They mix chemicals with a sugar liquid and feed this to the bees. This is done 5 times a day, and the bees begin to associate the smell with the food. When it smells the scent again, the bee extends its tongue to lap up the nectar - and the scientists are able to measure this reflex.
The implications of this training for human health is huge - and honey bees are already being used as early detectors of lung and skin cancers, and silent diseases such as diabetes. Even pregnancies can be confirmed by the bees! Patients breathe into diagnostic tools and the bees that have been trained to detect any of these diseases will move nearer to the tube that contain the breath of the sick patient.
In effect the bees are now challenging the position of sniffer dogs, and the security industry is now extremely interested in using bees to detect explosives or drugs. With approximately 100 million landmines in existence in 70 countries around the world, think what brilliant results the tiny honey bee could achieve!
Whilst our canine agents are around 70 and need only 10 minutes training to determine a particular scent.
With the current threat to both cargo and passenger flights, a British Company, Inscentinel Ltd, has devised a sniffer box to identify fertiliser bombs, and plastic explosives . Just three trained bees are placed inside the box, the size of a shoe box, and air is sucked in via tubes. If the bees detect the scent of any of these chemicals, they stick out their tongues, sending an immediate Red Alert message to the handler. Perhaps these tiny insects will save us a huge amount of money (and our dignity) by avoiding the installation of full body scanners at our airports. Currently Inscentinel are looking for partners with whom to deploy their technology.
So, take care of your bees, and who know, they may take even better care of us!