Realise Design Blog

We’ve recently developed a bad habit of making awful bee jokes… but we promise to ‘bee-have’ better in future.  The reason for this sharp drop in our humour quality is Realise has been working with our partners ML Electronics to develop a ‘bee feeding machine’ for start up Inscentinel Ltd.

What?! Why on earth do bees need feeding? Well, this is not because bees are rubbish at feeding themselves, but  that Inscentinel train bees using a food reward system to act as sniffer dogs, or rather, sniffer bees, to be used to sniff out explosives, drugs and even cancer in people.

In fact, bees don’t “sniff” in the way mammals do, they use their antennae on the outside of their head to detect molecules in the passing air. The “acute olfactory sense” of honeybees can be more sensitive than a dog’s nose in detecting trace amounts of compounds in the air. Move over rover – our new furry friends can detect DNT a residue in TNT and other explosives in as little as a few thousandths of a part per trillion (that’s incredible by the way), far better than anything man has been able to devise.

Based on this, Inscentinel has developed their portable vapour detection machine, known as VASOR™ (Volatile Analysis by Specific Olfactory Recognition). Incredibly they slot 42 live bees into each VASOR, all ready for front line sniffing action.

This professional piece of equipment looks like a funky sci-fi dust buster which reminds me of the droid troop ships in Star Wars. I love it. Oh dear, see how quickly a product designer can grasp an innovative new business concept and bring it down to the level of sci-fi geekdom. But see what I mean though?

Now that VASOR is being used in the field, the problem for Inscentinel has become the time it takes to train the bees manually; fine when they were just doing small batches for testing, but non-viable on a more commercial scale. Inscentinel realised they needed a top team to help them find a solution. After a good meeting of minds, they chose our friends at MLE  to produce an automatic bee training machine to do the job. MLE turned to us again to help with the mechanical design and CAD.  The resulting Bee Conditioning Unit (BCU) is a bit like a tiny McDonalds come milking parlour for bees. Heaven’s, poor bees they”ll have franchises popping up on every “Hive-Street” before they know it (see what I mean about the awful humour).

With MLE we brainstormed lots of different mechanisms and control systems to do this. In particular we did a lot of sketching around a food packaging style concept that had potential to be mass produced in vast quantities for pennies. Initially this seemed like a great solution…

One of the constraints however was that Inscentinel already had an existing bee holder which they’ve optimised. Using Solidworks we were quickly able to test the geometry of our idea when combined with this module…  the 3D CAD proved that it was close, but geometrically just not quite possible.

All was not lost though! We were also then able to rapidly test the next most promising idea, which produced something equally simple, easily disassembled and able to be put through the dish washer. These parts were all produced in a few days by rapid prototyping and CNC machining, and assembled together into MLE’s testbed.

The working proof of principle prototype was introduced to the bees in August. The mechanical parts have performed well and the machine is currently undergoing trials with live bees.

It’s always a pleasure working with MLE and this is a good example of the synergy between their creative systems and electronics design capability and our creative mechanical design and 3D CAD skills. And it’s been great to get to know Inscentinel who are very nice people and deserve much success. It’s extremely satisfying to work on such a fascinating project that will benefit all of us in the future.

Tags: 3D CAD, Commercialisation, Engineering, Mechanical Design, Research