Harnessing Bees Case Study

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Q: What do you get if you cross a bee with a skunk?
A: An animal that stinks and stings! Susana Soares created a simple way of harnessing bees to screen for a number of diseases, including cancers, like tumors of the lung and ovaries. Her glass apparatus, called “ Bee’s.” features a large chamber and a smaller connected chamber housed within it. After training the bees to compose an odor they are rewarded with a food, such as sugar. The insects are released into the glass bowl and a patient’s would blow into the smaller compartment of the glass bowl and wait to see if a swarm gathers toward something alarming in the patients breath. Particularly scientists are surprised by the fact that these bees can even be trained to detect cancer. Investigators …show more content…
Sniffer dogs identify odors correctly only about 71 percent of the time, while also requiring three months’ training. Bees have achieved an accuracy rate of 98 percent and can be trained in about 10 minutes. In developing bees the Portuguese native needed something that enabled the user to easily transport bees into the instrument and safely suck them back out using a vacuum. Prototypes have undergone field testing, and although it didn’t find any instances of cancer, it did turn up a case of diabetes that was later confirmed. It’s unlikely, though, that the concept will amount to anything beyond being an exhibition curiosity. While there was a brief period in which she felt ambitious enough to reach out to potential collaborators, the process proved so time consuming and unfruitful that she ultimately gave up. The only organizations that seemed even remotely interested in her idea were a handful of charities. So for now, "Bee's" exists as one of those purely academic exercises to show, as she puts it, the "symbiotic relationship" humans have with nature and how "technology and science can better foster these relationships." The entomologist, has dealt with multiple
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