It's been over two decades since the war between Yugoslavia and the now independent Croatia, but citizens of the latter are still dealing with the physical aftermath of that conflict. Live land mine fields still pose a major everyday risk to the people of Croatia.
The Associated Press estimates that 90,000 land mines were planted during Croatia's war for independence, peppering a 470 square mile area across the country. Since the early 1990s, these mines have killed 316 people according to Dijana Plestina, the head of Croatia's de-mining bureau.
"While this exists, we are living in a kind of terror, at least for the people who are living in areas suspected to have mines," she stated. "And of course, that is unacceptable. We will not be a country in peace until this problem is solved."
A surprising new approach to finding them has emerged though that may revolutionize how the country deals with these land mines.
Nikola Kezic, a professor and honey bee expert at Zagreb University, is working on a way to train bees to associate the smell of their food with TNT. He hopes to use groups of bees as mine detectors.
He is taking a Pavlovian conditioning approach, mixing a sugar solution into TNT. His goal is to eventually have the bees trained to seek out TNT, allowing heat seeking cameras to track them as they swarm around undetected mines.
Kezic plans to use these bees primarily on already de-mined fields, which unfortunately bear a very real risk of holding unaccounted for land mines.
"We are not saying that we will discover all the mines on a minefield, but the fact is that it should be checked if a minefield is really de-mined," Kezic said. "It has been scientifically proven that there are never zero mines on a de-mined field, and that's where bees could come in."
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