Deploying bees for biosurveillance

[Jason Bobe]

Interesting concept from speculative designer Thomas Thwaites. A theoretical distributed surveillance tool of the future...bees...looking for pollen from illicit GMO plants:

http://www.thomasthwaites.com/policing-genes/

http://vimeo.com/11323803

http://www.thomasthwaites.com/folio5/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/diagram-2251x850.png

Jason

[Cory Geesaman]

Not exactly for prohibition or assisting patent trolls - but all the same very cool if they have decoded bee dances.  I knew people had come to conclude that bees tell directions to one another by dancing, but I always assumed the specific meanings of dances were unknown to us and/or specific to individual hives.

[leaking pen]

No, a big chunk of that has been decoded a while ago, dirctions of turning and distances.

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[shreyans chordia]

Most innovative :)

As it is only an idea I would like to point out, what happens if a bee visits many farms and the pollen is not from a single source or location. How can you make it foolproof that way? 

Yanz

[Sebastiaan Broekema]

Well i'm not completely sure but  you can't be entirely sure from which source it will be with a single hive. The waggle dance of bees merely points in the general direction of the source, to reach the source the other bees still need their own senses to find the exact spot. But if you use multiple hives all set up at a different location and analyze their waggle dances and if you discover overlapping regions, you are sure that in region you will find GMO plants.

Op donderdag 12 april 2012 08:16:43 UTC+2 schreef shreyans chordia het volgende:

Op donderdag 12 april 2012 08:16:43 UTC+2 schreef shreyans chordia het volgende:

Op donderdag 12 april 2012 08:16:43 UTC+2 schreef shreyans chordia het volgende:

[shreyans chordia]

yeah i get ur idea.. it ll be like moving step by step towards the GMO farm from one hive to the next.. but my question was what if the pollen origin itself was misleading in the first place as the bee would visit several farms before going into the fake hive and dancing..   And im assuming the cost for installing many fake hives also would be an issue..

[Cathal Garvey]

One way to evade bee-policing would be to transform plastids such as chloroplasts. As pollen grains carry no chloroplasts, modified DNA won't be detectable in such samples.

A more straightforward route would be to make your plants self-pollinators with closed flowers. Manual flower opening for crosses is still possible, otherwise flowers bud, self fertilise, then drop off and go straight to fruit.

Mutant flowers producing no anthers etc are also doable I think.

Sebastiaan Broekema <sebastiaa...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Cathal Garvey]

One way to evade bee-policing would be to transform plastids such as chloroplasts. As pollen grains carry no chloroplasts, modified DNA won't be detectable in such samples.

A more straightforward route would be to make your plants self-pollinators with closed flowers. Manual flower opening for crosses is still possible, otherwise flowers bud, self fertilise, then drop off and go straight to fruit.

Mutant flowers producing no anthers etc are also doable I think.

Sebastiaan Broekema <sebastiaa...@gmail.com> wrote:

[shreyans chordia]

yeah wat u suggest could be possibly done to thwart bee policing.  Nice ideas.

They better watch out for u in the future :P

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