Unbeknownst to many, bees have an ability to identify the scent of explosives by using their antennae. In previous years, countries such as Croatia have used bees to pinpoint the locations of unexploded landmines.

Now, according to an article on BBC News, a team from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia have called on the help of drones to keep an eye on bees as they track down landmines. 

With an estimated 30,000 landmines in Croatia and a further estimated 80,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are remnants of the Balkans war of the 1990s, this project diminishes any danger for humans if they were to track the progress of the bees on foot. 

In the project’s preliminary stages, the team super-imposed bees onto drone-captured footage of an outdoor area. They then trained a machine-learning algorithm to follow super-imposed bees (otherwise known as ‘synthetic bees’) within the footage, with test results showing the algorithm providing just over an 80% accuracy rate in tracking the ‘synthetic bees’.

“It’s very difficult for human observers to find these flying bees in this video footage let alone computer vision systems,” said Prof Vladimir Risojević from the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“There were moments when I thought that we are outright crazy for trying to do that but I am pleasantly surprised with the results that we obtained.”

A further test saw the team take this technology to a minefield where mines had been buried in undisclosed locations. The drones took a predetermined route capturing footage of both the minefield and the bees in action. With the footage captured, the analysis was carried out by the algorithm as to where the bees were clustered, therefore highlighting where potential landmines could be situated.

The results of this test are yet to be published, though Prof Risojević noted how there was a strong link between the location of the landmines at the test site and the clusters of bees.