Doctors have long treated patients for exceptionally bad bee stings, but now, it looks like the insects may be helping the field of medicine.
New research from Inscentinel, a UK-based firm specializing in insect research, suggests that honey bees can be trained to detect certain early-stage cancers in humans.
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Using this breakthrough, Portuguese designer Susana Soares has developed a glass device for diagnosis using honey bees and a patient's breath.
Thanks to their super-sensitive sense of smell, bees can detect odors that a human nose can't, Soares explains on her website. Biomarkers associated with tuberculosis, lung cancer, skin cancer and diabetes, which can all be detected through smell, are present on a patient's breath.
Soares designed a glass objects with two enclosures: a small chamber that the patient breathes into and a larger chamber where trained bees are kept. If the bees detect the odor they where trained to pinpoint - in this case that of disease biomarkers - they'll rush into the smaller chamber where the breath is.
The cancer-detecting bees are trained by exposing the insects to the smell, then feeding them sugar, so they associate the odor with a food reward.
Soares says that properly trained bees are "very accurate" in early medical diagnosis.
Bees and wasps have previously been trained to detect bombs by smell.
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Homepage image: Flickr, Quinten Questel