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Honeybees could be the new indispensible tool for finding landmines

Of all the weapons of warfare we've created over human history, landmines have to be the most insidious, simply because they continue to kill thousands of people every year, even in places where wars have been over for decades. Now, there's a new crusader joining the quest to track them down, though — honeybees.

In Croatia, it's estimated that there are around 90,000 landmines still buried in the ground, put there between 1991 and 1995, during the Croatian War of Independence. Originally estimated at covering 13,000 square kilometres of the countryside, the amount of land suspected of having landmines was reduced to 1,200 sq km by 2003. According to statements made back in April by Croatian officials, this is down to just over 680 square kilometres now, with an estimated 74,000 mines still to be found.

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Demining efforts in Croatia have been going on since 1998, using metal detectors, specially-designed minesweeping tanks called 'mine-rollers' and 'mine-flails', as well as mine-sniffing dogs. However, despite programs to raise awareness of landmines and around 15,000 warning signs around potential minefields, as of April, over 500 people have been killed by these mines, and nearly three time that number have been injured.

One of the biggest problems with current methods is that a patch of land can never be 100% certified to be mine-free. There is always the chance that some mines were left behind, which, as described in a Huffington Post article from earlier today, can have disastrous results for anyone believing that the land is safe.

The idea of using bees to find landmines was explored about 10 years ago, by researchers at the University of Montana. Their findings showed that bees could be trained to find the specific scents of the chemicals used in making mines, by associating these scents with a sugar 'reward'.

Professor Mateja Janes, from Zagreb University in Croatia, has been working on training bees to track down the scent of TNT.

"We have heard that Americans were trying to develop something similar in a secret project, but seems we've developed it before them," she said, according to Croatian Times Online News.

"Bees can smell flowers from a distance of 4.5 kilometres. Therefore they can smell the explosives at the same distance. They are better at it than dogs," she added.

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Although the Huffington Post article mentions that it could be some time before the bees are put to use, according to the Croatian Times, Janes and her team should be ready to use them in real demining efforts, near the southern Croatian town of Benkovac, sometime later this month.

"We think this has a lot of potential," Janes said in the article. "We hope this is a concept which can be developed and we hope it is something we can export to other countries and become indispensable demining tools."

(Images courtesy: Getty/Wikimedia Commons)

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