Bees can help investigators find a body, research at Virginia’s newest body farm

This article is part of “Solutionaries,” our continuing commitment to solutions journalism, highlighting the creative people in communities working to make the world a better place, one solution at a time. Find out what you can do to help and subscribe to our Solutionaries channel on Youtube.

Bees could be the key to finding missing people. Did that get your attention?

It’s one of the many interesting research projects going on in Virginia. George Mason University has what’s called a “body farm.” It is new and one of only a few in the nation.

10 News got an inside look at the process in Northern Virginia and how you can be part of the research helping investigators solve murders now and in the future.

“These little scientists with wings on them, they’re going to be able to take us to the body,” Mary Ellen O’Toole, the Forensic Science Program Director at GMU said, while standing outside of a bee hive on campus.

Bees helping investigators work murder cases.

“They’re going to be able to tell us where someone has been dumped, where someone is laying outside and decomposing,” O’Toole, who retired from the FBI after nearly three decades, said.

Her work includes understanding serial killers and other high-profile cases like the disappearances of Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway.

“Working a serial murder case obviously is one of the greatest challenges because oftentimes, the victims are found outside,” the director explains. “Now we have this body farm where we’re studying the very thing that I worked on in the FBI, outdoor homicide scenes.”

The school now has just the eighth body farm in the country and the only one in this region.

“The body farm here is my dream,” said Emily Rancourt, a former police crime scene specialist who now works at GMU as the forensic science program associate director.

“I would find human remains, and it was very difficult to pinpoint the time since death,” Rancourt said. “I always would want to bring some answers to the family of the cases that we were working on. And sometimes we couldn’t do that.”

That’s because what happens to a body depends a lot on the environment, soil type, and more. The research they can do here will bring answers.

“We will have bodies that will be put out here in the summer months, in the winter months, in the fall. We will also have different scenarios that we create with the bodies,” Rancourt said. “We might take a body and wrap it up in carpet and leave it on the ground of the facility. We want to bring answers for these families. We want to give a voice to our victims who can no longer speak for themselves anymore and we want to bring all this together and collect the data so that we can help the future generations that are working as crime scene investigators.”

Bees are also part of the research.

“If a human body is dumped outside, they begin to decompose, and honey bees, just by virtue of how they act in nature, they fly around and they land on flowers and other things. And then they take that back to their hives,” O’Toole explained.

So when someone goes missing, investigators can contact beekeepers, test their bee hives for body decomposition, and drastically narrow down the search area.

“If it tests positive, then we can estimate that the body is likely within two to five miles of those hives where the bees are,” O’Toole said. “We’re talking about narrowing down, could be 100 miles it could be 50 miles, but from an investigative perspective, that’s a big area to cover. To be able to determine is somebody out here? Has somebody been left out here are their human remains decomposing out here? They’re going to be little scientists on our behalf and I think that’s going to be remarkable.”

One of the limitations to how much research they can do is money. They have to have people checking the bodies — sometimes multiple times a day. Rancourt says you can make a donation to help with this research that will help smaller agencies in Roanoke.

“This is the kind of research that will improve these kinds of cases I think all over Virginia, and ultimately, hopefully all over the country,” O’Toole said.

You can make the decision to donate your body to science before you pass, or your loved ones can do it after you die. For information on the Virginia State Anatomical Program, click here. GMU is still waiting for its first donor body but can do other research until that happens.

10 News is taking you inside the new science research of solving crimes. Click the links below for more stories in our series:

This article is part of “Solutionaries,” our continuing commitment to solutions journalism, highlighting the creative people in communities working to make the world a better place, one solution at a time. Find out what you can do to help and subscribe to our Solutionaries channel on Youtube.