What the Bees Know

The glass vessel Susana Soares designed looks like something between a scientific instrument and an art object—two spheres, one nested inside the other, both transparent, both patient. You breathe into it. The bees decide.

Soares, a Portuguese designer, trained honeybees to detect the volatile organic compounds that certain diseases leave behind in breath and sweat. The conditioning is Pavlovian: associate the smell with sugar, repeat until the association holds. It takes minutes. Put the trained bees in the outer chamber, have the patient breathe in, and if the bees cluster inside the smaller inner sphere, something is wrong. Cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes—bees have a more sensitive olfactory system than dogs, which already puts them ahead of most early-stage diagnostic tools in raw detection capability.

The project showed at Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven. The practical application Soares had in mind was the developing world—places where healthcare infrastructure catches diseases too late for treatment to work. A glass jar and a handful of trained insects as a first-line diagnostic. There’s something beautiful and depressing about that framing in equal measure: beautiful because the solution is so direct, depressing because the need is that acute.

What draws me to it as a design object is that it doesn’t hide the process. The bees are visible. The decision happens in front of you. Most medical technology disappears behind a screen or a readout—this just shows you the bees moving.