Bomb-sniffing bees

Dusan Stojanovic and Darko Bandic, AP, write about how a professor at Zagreb University is training honeybees to sniff out landmines.

Croatia is joining the European Union in a month or so and 466 square miles of it are still studded with mines from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.

Bees have a perfect sense of smell that an sniff out explosives. They are being trained to associate the explosive smell with a food smell.

To test the trained bees, the researchers put out pots of food and pots of food laced with TNT. The bees go for the TNT mixture.

Of course, they admit, it's easier to train one bee than thousands.

Creative? Maybe a little wacky--but yes.