{"id":10445,"date":"2021-05-08T21:31:39","date_gmt":"2021-05-08T14:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illume-emag.com\/?p=10445"},"modified":"2021-05-08T21:31:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-08T14:31:39","slug":"scientists-taught-bees-smell-coronavirus-can-identify-case-within-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/scientists-taught-bees-smell-coronavirus-can-identify-case-within-seconds\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists have taught bees to smell the coronavirus. They can identify a case within seconds."},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists in the Netherlands have trained bees to identify COVID-19 through their sense of smell,\u00a0according to a press release from Wageningen University.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The research was conducted on more than 150 bees in Wageningen University’s bio-veterinary research laboratory.<\/p>\n

The scientists trained the bees by giving them a treat \u2014 a sugar-water solution \u2014 every time they were exposed to the scent of a mink infected with COVID-19. Each time the bees were exposed to a non-infected sample, they wouldn’t get a reward (a process known as Pavlovian conditioning).<\/p>\n

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Eventually, the bees could identify an infected sample within a few seconds \u2014 and would then stick out their tongues like clockwork to collect the sugar water.<\/p>\n

Bees aren’t the first animals to detect COVID-19 by scent. Researchers have also trained dogs to distinguish between positive and negative COVID-19 samples from human saliva or sweat with fairly high levels of accuracy. A\u00a0small German study\u00a0found that dogs could identify positive COVID-19 samples 94% of the time.<\/p>\n

That’s because metabolic changes from the coronavirus make an infected person’s bodily fluids smell slightly different than those of a non-infected person.<\/p>\n

But researchers still aren’t sure whether animals are the best bet for sniffing out COVID-19 cases outside the lab.<\/p>\n

“No one is saying they can replace a PCR machine, but they could be very promising,” Holger Volk, a veterinary neurologist,\u00a0told Nature. PCR machines are what lab technicians use to process standard COVID-19 swab tests.<\/p>\n

At the very least, certain animals could be useful for identifying COVID-19 in places or countries in which high-tech laboratory equipment is scarce or inaccessible.<\/p>\n

Wageningen scientists, for instance, are working on a prototype of a machine that could automatically train multiple bees at once, then uses their skills to test for coronavirus aerosols (tiny virus-laden particles) in the surrounding environment.<\/p>\n

Source: Businessinsider<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists in the Netherlands have trained bees to identify COVID-19 through their sense of smell,\u00a0according to a press release from Wageningen University. The research was conducted on more than 150 bees in Wageningen University’s bio-veterinary research laboratory. The scientists trained the bees by giving them a treat \u2014 a sugar-water solution \u2014 every time they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10446,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1087],"class_list":{"0":"post-10445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-travel","8":"tag-coronavirus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}