Honeybees have a sense of smell about 100 times more powerful than a human’s. They can sniff out pollen from hundreds of feet away and even learn to pinpoint the location of landmines. Guess what else they can identify by smell: lung cancer.
When a person has lung cancer, the chemical makeup of that person’s breath changes. This change is too faint for people to notice. But not for honeybees.
At Michigan State University, researchers made a chemical formula that smells like the breath of someone with lung cancer. They made another compound imitating a healthy person’s breath. Then they selected 20 honeybees as test subjects.
The scientists strapped the bees into 3-D printed harnesses and attached tiny electrodes to their brains. These electrodes allowed tracking of each bee’s brain activity on a computer.
“We can see differences in how the honeybees are smelling,” says scientist Michael Parnas. “We detected several different neurons firing in the honeybees’ brains that clearly differentiated between the synthetic lung cancer breath and healthy breath.”
This ability to detect subtle differences helps honeybees every day. Each beehive has its own scent. When a bee enters a colony, the bees that live there can tell whether the newcomer belongs based on odor. If bees detect the smell of another colony, they kick out the invader. Just like they can decide whether another bee is a friend or foe, honeybees can even identify kinds of lung cancer. At least, that’s what the honeybees at the University of Michigan did.
There are two main types of lung cancer, and they behave very differently. Small cell lung cancer spreads fast. In 70% of patients with this form of cancer, the disease has already spread throughout the body (metastasized) by the time it gets diagnosed. Non-small cell lung cancer takes longer to develop. So early diagnosis of the type of lung cancer could save lives.
This is not the first time that scientists suggested that bees could detect human diseases. But the researchers at Michigan State want to take the findings to a new level: creating a device to mimic the sensors in a honeybee’s brain. Once the device is ready, patients will breathe into it to get an instant diagnosis.
Until researchers can train a machine to sniff like a honeybee, these fuzzy flying insects offer the best tools for the job.
Why? God knew that humans would need to enlist the help of honeybees. Even insects can show us how much He loves and provides for His people.
