Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio Pay
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. Lauren Vogo bam here with a classic episode
Speaker 1: of the podcast. A lot of non human animals are
Speaker 1: smarter than we give them credit for, and can be
Speaker 1: taught all kinds of things if properly motivated. In this one,
Speaker 1: we explore how researchers have made educational inroads with bees. Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogebam here. Back in two entomologists Joe
Speaker 1: Lewis and Jim Tomlinson joined in a project that for
Speaker 1: the first time uncovered the ability of an insect to
Speaker 1: learn through association. It was at the time not only novel,
Speaker 1: it was an out and out revelation. An insect, in
Speaker 1: this case, the parasitic wasp, which feeds on and eventually
Speaker 1: kills certain agricultural pests, could learn in a most basic
Speaker 1: way I think Pavlov's dogs, except smaller and buzzier. From
Speaker 1: that study and other similar research by for example, ARPA,
Speaker 1: the U S Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
Speaker 1: we have spun forward to the point where honeybees now
Speaker 1: have successfully sniffed out long buried land mines in Croatia.
Speaker 1: That's a long way from some thirty years ago, when
Speaker 1: Louis and Tomlinson released their findings in Nature magazine, to
Speaker 1: the astonishment of many. Louis said, you talk about training
Speaker 1: in insect period and you get the look the I
Speaker 1: start narrowing. It just doesn't make sense. So how did
Speaker 1: they start making sense of it? Let's talk about associate
Speaker 1: of learning. The whole idea behind this is fairly simple,
Speaker 1: even if no one dreamed decades ago that insects could
Speaker 1: do it. With pav Love's dogs, when an outside stimulus
Speaker 1: a bell is often sided, was associated with food, the
Speaker 1: dogs salivated. The dogs learned intuitively that the bell meant
Speaker 1: food was coming for the Lewis Tumlinson wasps. Various odors
Speaker 1: that the wasps didn't normally recognize, like vanilla or chocolate,
Speaker 1: or mixed with something that was associated with the pests
Speaker 1: that these parasitic wasps were trying to make their hosts.
Speaker 1: After a very short time, the wasps associated the vanilla
Speaker 1: or whatever with the insects that they wanted to attack,
Speaker 1: and thus would fly toward the odor. It took less
Speaker 1: than five minutes to train the wasps, which like bees
Speaker 1: and dogs, have all factory senses. Thousands of times more
Speaker 1: powerful than a humans. As the studies continued, new researchers
Speaker 1: linked the smell of various chemical compounds and explosives to food. Today,
Speaker 1: honey bee trained for just two days could associate the
Speaker 1: smell of explosives with food and seek out that smell too.
Speaker 1: Big advantages to training insects to track odors rather than
Speaker 1: say a dog. They learn faster, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: more of them to teach. But releasing a swarm of
Speaker 1: wasps or bees onto a battlefield or even a now
Speaker 1: quiet meadow in Croatia that may be littered with minds
Speaker 1: has its challenges. Of course, tracking the insects is foremost
Speaker 1: among them. It's impossible, as Timlinson points out, to put
Speaker 1: ships on each of them, and you can't, as Louis says,
Speaker 1: put Alisha on a bee. Still, scientists can trace the
Speaker 1: insects movements in at least small numbers through devices like
Speaker 1: drones and webcams, and something early researchers called a wasppound.
Speaker 1: Lewis's waspound, about the size of a large coin, contains
Speaker 1: five wasps, a tiny camera, and a computer fan that
Speaker 1: pulls air through a small hole in the bottom of
Speaker 1: the device. When the hound comes near the target, smell
Speaker 1: the wasps. Lewis says, cluster around that little hole, like
Speaker 1: pigs to a trough. Another problem researchers face is scale.
Speaker 1: Training one wasp or one b at a time can
Speaker 1: be laborious. Scientists have come up with methods to train
Speaker 1: more than that, but insects, like people, learn at different rates,
Speaker 1: so mass learning is not as accurate. In addition, bad
Speaker 1: weather or anything that disrupts the insexibility to smell can
Speaker 1: cause difficulties. Research is continuing. Tomlinson and Lewis never envisioned
Speaker 1: be snifficg out bombs. Tomlinson is a professor of entomology
Speaker 1: at Penn State and Lewis a retired fessor and a
Speaker 1: research entomologist with the U S Department of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia.
Speaker 1: They were looking for ways to control pests biologically rather
Speaker 1: than with pesticides, and in fact they were very successful
Speaker 1: at it. Along with UK scientist John Pickett, Lewis and
Speaker 1: Tomlinson won the two thousand eight Wolf Prize for Agriculture,
Speaker 1: considered by many as a type of Nobel Prize in
Speaker 1: the field. From the official announcement, on the Wolf Foundation website.
Speaker 1: They were awarded the prize quote for their remarkable discoveries
Speaker 1: of mechanisms governing plant insect and plant plant interactions. Their
Speaker 1: scientific contributions on chemical ecology have fostered the development of
Speaker 1: integrated pest management and significantly advanced agricultural sustainability. Whether their
Speaker 1: work eventually will help form the basis of a widespread
Speaker 1: practical use of bees and wasps in sniffing out bombs
Speaker 1: or drugs remains to be seen. Even they have some doubts.
Speaker 1: Tomlinson said, you can train insects to find a mine,
Speaker 1: that's not a problem. But then you release them into
Speaker 1: the field to find a mine. How do you track
Speaker 1: them unless someone comes up with a small chip so
Speaker 1: that you can track them with some electronic means. I
Speaker 1: don't see how in the world you can use them,
Speaker 1: and says Louis, to move it from the lab to
Speaker 1: the actual field, you have to scale it up and
Speaker 1: refine it. But we clearly can see that it can
Speaker 1: be practical in development. It's technically feasible. It's all on
Speaker 1: valid science. The ability is there. It's about the demand
Speaker 1: for it and putting the infrastructure in place for that.
Speaker 1: Scientists have been trying to find ways to harness the
Speaker 1: remarkable power of smell for years. Bees, some believe, have
Speaker 1: such strong abilities that they can smell out illnesses, even cancer.
Speaker 1: A Spanish designer went so far as developing a prototype
Speaker 1: bowl complete with honey bees that you can breathe into
Speaker 1: to see how the bees react as a sort of
Speaker 1: proto diagnosis, and tests are being done in California with
Speaker 1: cancer detecting dogs too. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article these are smart, but try training them at home
Speaker 1: on houstuffworks dot Com. Written by John Donovan. Brain Stuff
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Speaker 1: Playing and Ramsey Young. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
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