MINE-DETECTION PLANS EXTEND TO BEE-TAGGING

The US Department of Defense (DoD) this week says it will begin testing
whether honey bees carrying tiny radio frequency (RF) tags can be used to
detect land mines.

Under a $3 million programme funded by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), engineers from the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory and the University of Montana will fit 50 bees with 27mg RF tags
to track their movements and detect any exposure to small amounts of explosives.

The commercially developed tags, about half the size of a grain of rice,
will be tracked using a mass spectrometer located in a man-made beehive.
Using special electronics and software, engineers will be
able to "read" information on the tags, such as traces of TNT or other
chemical materials.

As a bee leaves the hive, it will trigger the reader, which scans a 10-digit
code on each tag and sends the bee's identification code, direction of
flight and the time to a modem. This downloads the data to a central
computer. The process is repeated when the bees return to the hive.

Inside the hive - which would be located in an area where land mines are
suspected - a system of analysis tools developed by Sandia National
Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Environmental Protection
Agency will scan for chemicals found in explosives. The tracking information
coupled with the analysis could help pinpoint land mine locations.

According to Ron Gilbert, electronic systems group leader at Pacific
Northwest, officials are anxious to see if the RF tags are light enough for
the bees and whether the 135kHz of electromagnetic energy within the beehive
will affect their behaviour. Tests planned for mid-year will use an actual
minefield located at Sandia, he said.

"We hope to get more incremental funding in the future for the programme,"
he added. The programme will develop smaller RF tags and extend the research
from explosives to nuclear materials, illegal narcotics and other threats.

The research drive forms part of a larger programme initiated by DARPA last
year to determine whether species of insects, fish or a range of
invertebrates can be used to monitor environmental characteristics,
including the presence of chemical or biological weapons (Jane's Defence
Weekly 8 April 1998).