It’s all the buzz. Bees can smell cancer and they are accurate, too. They now join dogs and other animals that have been trained to smell cancer. That’s cool all by itself but here’s what I want to know: Who looks at a bee and thinks, ‘I wonder if I can train it to smell cancer?’ That it only takes about 10 minutes to train a bee to smell cancer is a breakthrough, I guess? Apparently training a bee is like training a puppy; positive food reward when a desired behavior is displayed. Once trained, bees are in a glass container. A subject breathes into the container and the bees provide a diagnosis. A recent study showed that trained honey bees can detect lung cancer cells with an impressive 88 percent success rate. There’s no report on what happens to the bees afterward. “Thank you for your service” and released into the wild? Probably not.
