The bees knees

Bees are wondrous creatures.

They pollinate our fruit! Our veggies! Our flowers! And they produce honey!

Oh, honey, those bees are the bees knees! Sure, you have to put up with an occasional sting - and I did hear somewhere that you're more likely to die from a bee sting than you are from a snake bite - but the buzz is that bees rock.

As it turns out, bees are bees-knees-ier than I thought.

They have acted as “biomarkers” at airports to monitor air quality, and to detect whether munitions testing at an Army base in Maryland was causing pollution. They have been trained to detect illicit drugs, and to track elephants with a goal of combating poaching. (Source: Boston Globe)

And there's a lab farm in Virginia where they're figuring out how to deploy bees to find dead bodies. (You've heard of cadaver dogs? I give you cadaver bees.) 

The scientists/academics and law enforcement types working on the farm use donated bodies that they place in different settings. As the donated bodies start decomposing:

...organic matter will permeate the air and the surrounding foliage. Bees will alight on native goldenrod and coneflowers, planted in a circle around the bodies to entice the insects.

A teaching assistant, Molly Kilcarr, and a forensics professor, Emily Rancourt, visit regularly, recording data on insect activity and collecting hair tufts, fingerprints and nail trimmings to document the unfolding decay.

The team will examine the beehives, placed just outside the locked gates, to see if the honey contains traces of the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that are released by decomposing human bodies, Eckenrode said. By determining which compounds are from humans, and differentiating them from VOCs produced by other animals, the researchers hope their efforts can help investigators narrow the search area.

Personally, I'd prefer my honey to be free of human VOCs. And, while I'm at it, animal VOCs. But this is all very interesting, no? And if it were my body that they were trying to find, I'd be delighted - if posthumous delight is possible - to have been discovered by bees. (Plus I'm sure any honey containing my VOCs would be delish.)

Bees aren't the only insect that's forensically useful. 

 ...insects have long been studied for the roles they play as tiny sleuths.

Blow flies flock to carcasses like, well, flies to honey.  

The developmental age of blow flies and their larvae has helped to determine timelines and whether a body has been moved, clues that can guide investigators, according to forensic entomology research in Europe, the United States and other countries. In Britain, entomologists have studied blow fly larvae on decaying corpses, including one zipped inside a suitcase, to determine how long a person has been dead.

There's also a bee that specializes in dead bodies. Vulture bees are carnivores, so it'll be no surprise if they're enlisted as tiny sleuths, too. And, yes, they do produce honey. So yuck. On the plus side, vulture bees don't sting. You gotta take the good with the bad.