The buzz of chasing criminals

Geographic profiling (GP), a technique currently used by police to track down serial killers, could be vastly improved by testing it on bumblebees.

GP can locate serail killers and bee hives

Kim Rossmo, the former detective that invented GP has teamed up with a group from Queen Mary, University of London to apply the method to study animal foraging behaviour.

Dr Raine from Queen Mary’s said: “GP is interesting to biologists because it can tell us which strategies animals use when foraging. The approach works well for very different animals: from bees and bats to great white sharks.”

In the past GP has been used by police forces to prioritise large lists of suspects in investigations of serial crimes - the computer simulation can predict where a suspect is most likely to live. The same thinking has led to scientists using the technique to find the entrance to bee hives from observing the locations of the flowers that bees visit.

Amazingly bee and baddy behaviour are somewhat similar - most serial crimes happen close to the killer’s home and this is surrounded by an area where the opportunity to commit a crime is low - the buffer zone. It seems bees act in a similar, but less fatal, way by not foraging near their hives they create a buffer zone to avoid predators and parasites locating their nest.

The results have great implications for bee conservation - it shows that GP could be used to locate areas of potential nesting to preserve rare and endangered bee species. This two way collaboration is also of great interest to criminologists who now have experimental data, which was impossible to obtain with criminal activity. With new laboratory results to advance the technique, it is hoped that GP can be improved for criminologists to predict serial killer movement more accurately.

By Leila Sattary