Bees and COVID 19

Honeybees have incredibly sensitive olfactory systems, used in the wild to detect nectar in plants that might be in very small amounts and quite far away. Scientists (and sometimes artists) have used this ability to diagnose diseases. This new work in the Netherlands uses a standard Pavlovian method to train bees, which turn out to be more easily taught tricks than one might think. Bees in the experiment were given a sugar solution reward for detecting COVID-19, in this case a sample on a q-tip, drawn from COVID-19-infected mink. The bees would extend their tongues to receive the reward; with enough practice, they'd extend their tongues when they detected COVID-19 even without the reward. Soon, the bees could return a result within a few seconds. Bees aren't the first animals to be used in this way, not even specifically with COVID-19. Dogs have also been trained to detect an infection from sweat samples in humans, although researchers say more peer-reviewed work is needed on that before it can be a viable solution.