BEES CAN SMELL MINES 

Physically traversing a minefield to deactivate the contents is dangerous and painstaking. One innovation that has clearly saved human life, has been to train bees to associate the smell of explosives with a sweet reward. Trained bees set loose in minefields amass at suspicious points giving mine clearance specialists an invaluable idea of the position of anti-personnel devices. However, there is a problem, it is often difficult to follow the bees sufficiently closely.

This in mind, a team from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia have come up with a way of using UAV’S to monitor the bees while they work. The unmanned aerial vehicles fly around, capturing footage of the insects, which is later analysed by computers to reveal where landmines may be hidden in the ground.