Dutch scientists have trained bees to identify coronavirus

Researchers from Wageningen University in the Dutch town of Lelystad announced recently that they had successfully taught bees to "extend their tongues when they smell the coronavirus". Bees have a sense of smell 50 times better than that of dogs, whose olfactory responses are already orders of magnitude more receptive than humans'.

They achieved the result via using the technique of conditioning. The researchers stated that "each time the bees were exposed to the scent from an infected sample, they received a sugar water solution reward." They go on to say that "by repeating this action several times, the bees associated the sugar reward with the scent as the stimulus."

Once successfully trained to stick their tongues out when exposed to the coronavirus-positive samples and subsequent sugar water reward, the bees eventually began performing the action even when the reward was not given.

Researchers could then simply watch and see whether or not the bee stuck out its tongue to determine whether a sample was COVID-positive or negative.

As The Daily Wire reports, "the bees used in the research were regular honeybees from a beekeeper and were placed in harnesses for the experiment." They add that samples from infected minks were originally used, but the researchers later moved on to using human samples."

Although the researchers boasted that "a trained bee can detect an infected sample within a few seconds", the method is unlikely to replace traditional tests.

The findings have yet to be published or peer reviewed. Nonetheless, the use of bees to detect coronavirus certainly is thinking out of the box.