Scientists Train Bees To Detect COVID-19 Through Smell
SCIENTISTS TRAIN BEES – In a bid to to find new ways to detect COVID-19, scientist tried training bees.
Bees are among the most important pollinators on the planet, provide us with honey, and even have an animated movie. However, scientists now believe that bees could actually be used to detect the new coronavirus.
Recently, scientists from Wageningen University and Research in Netherlands asked the question: “could bees be trained to find COVID-19 in Pavlovian conditions?”.
As such, the experiment began with 150 bees put to the test in a Biosafety Laboratory in the research center. According to an article from Unilad, the researchers did a range of setups to get the best result.
Afterward, the bees reportedly learned to detect COVID-19 through their sense of smell. The press release for the study stated:
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
Furthermore, using repeated conditioning, the bees began to extend their tongues just to look for the scent alone with no reward offered. Now, a trained bee can find an infected sample within a few seconds.
Following this, the project received support from France’s Université Paul Sabatier and startup InsectSense, which is working on a machine that could potentially train a slew of bees at once.
Along with this, InsectSense was working on a biosensor that could deploy the trained bees for diagnosis of potential COVID-19 infections they called the “BeeSense”.
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