Gold Gathering Bees

Bees Trained to Collect Gold DustIn the Upper Congo past gold mining's legacy left a moonscape of large and small open pits. Some of these pits date to the turn of the previous century. These historical gold ore extractions were notably inefficient leaving behind small, but significant, amounts of gold dust hidden amidst vast acreages of mining spoil.Enter the trained bees.The Native Bee Laboratory, in a unique public / private partnership with the Gold Consortium, has trained bees to detect and retrieve the globular gold dust found in these former mines. As can be seen in this picture of a typical Golden Bee nest, these animals can be extremely effective little "gold diggers".Future plans call for programming these bees to not only gather gold, but to perform the actual transmutation of in situ cupprous outcroppings into gold or near gold. Such opportunities, where no opportunities previously existed, allow micro-fabrication and bio-diversification within such small spaces that individual agents (e.g., paleofarmers and septuagenarians) could reap the rewards that opportunity vacuums were formerly devoid of.BeeNews Release Date: April 1, 2017