Heck, I'm just another dyslexic atheist who doesn't believe in Dog (Before that, I was a devil worshipper who sold his soul to Santa!) but even I can see that Bee Tagging is a worthwhile pursuit.
After all, we're talking about protecting the troops!!
More lunacy below the imaginary crease in the page...
I know there's been more than a little back-and-forth over the past few days at "The Kos" about how Bee Tagging might not be such a great idea. To them, I say, "Don't you support our troops?"
Jane's Defense Weekly explains:
MINE-DETECTION PLANS EXTEND TO BEE-TAGGING, AMERICAS, THE (sic)
The US Department of Defense (DoD) this week says it will begin testing whether honey bees carrying tiny radio frequency (RF) tagscan be used to detect land mines.Under a $3 million programme funded by the Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency (DARPA), engineers from the Pacific NorthwestNational Laboratory and the University of Montana will fit 50 beeswith 27mg RF tags to track their movements and detect any exposureto small amounts of explosives. The commercially developed tags, about half the size of a grain ofrice, will be tracked using a mass spectrometer located in a man-made beehive. Using special electronics and software, engineerswill be able to "read" information on the tags, such as traces of TNT or other chemical materials.As a bee leaves the hive, it will trigger the reader, which scans a 10-digit code on each tag and sends the bee's identification code,direction of flight and the time to a modem. This downloads the datato a central computer.
Well that sounds easy enough!
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how the whole thing worked out with the bees, because that was written back in 1999 and I'm too lazy to look it up)
But that's not important. The important thing is that we've got Bees to tag!
So, I'm just saying maybe we should go a little easier on our Conservative, Bee Tagging friends. After all, a lot of them just don't live in the real world.
Hey, I've been there. One time I just couldn't work up the courage to climb Mt. McKinley because I was in Denali.