Bees Work as Bloodhounds at Chemical Arms Dump

They’re busy as, well, as bees, and the Army spies on their every move, counting their comings and goings, sniffing them, even gauging the amount of wind generated by their wings.

Thousands of honeybees have been put to work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, enlisted as environmental monitors to detect traces of escaping chemical weapons at one of the nation’s most toxic dump sites.

Their mission: Simply do what bees do, buzzing from flower to flower, gathering nectar and pollen and, inadvertently, particles of everything else they happen to touch.

“A honeybee is probably nature’s most superb monitor of materials,” said Jerry J. Bromenshenk, a University of Montana biologist who designed the project. “You’ve got a little flying fuzzy creature with electrostatically charged hairs,” he said. “They’re like flying dust mops.”

The trick is shaking out the dust. In half a dozen previous projects at other contaminated sites, Bromenshenk periodically vacuumed bees from their hives, ground them up and studied their remains.

This project is more sophisticated, with 14 beehives enclosed in wooden boxes shaped like two-drawer filing cabinets that are loaded with high-tech instruments.

Infrared beams across the entry slots record the comings and goings of each hive’s 10,000 residents. The hives are constantly weighed, while other devices measure and chart their temperature and humidity.

Researchers periodically draw air from the hives through tubes loaded with carbon filters that trap volatile chemicals.

“We look for the strange and unusual, or the increasing or new chemical in the hive,” said Bromenshenk, who wears a bee-patterned tie.

More specifically, they are looking for evidence of chemicals that have been produced at the installation’s Edgewood Area since World War I.

Poisons including chlorine, mustard agent, tear gas and phosgene were manufactured along Canal Creek, which empties into a saltwater marsh, and buried in a landfill in a section called O Field.

Other toxin-monitoring projects in the area use fish and frogs. These animals serve a function similar to that of the canaries that coal miners once carried below ground to detect poison gas: If the canary collapsed, it was time for the miners to flee.

The Army hopes healthy bees will help allay public fear about the area.

“In some ways,” said Aberdeen spokesman George Mercer, “it’s easier for citizens to trust honeybees than it is to trust a bureaucrat.”