MANASSAS, Va. (WAVY) — Walk into the woods next to the Science and Technology campus of George Mason University and you’ll see a four-acre plot enclosed in a chain link fence, and right next to it, three white boxes.
Just don’t get too close.
The boxes house about 30,000 European honey bees. Professor Mary Ellen O’Toole calls them her “little-winged crime fighters.” O’Toole, the lead researcher on the project, is hoping to get her first donated body sometime soon. She and other researchers will test their theory that bees can help them find decomposing bodies.
“Bees can be very good vectors for finding humans that have been left outside,” O’Toole said. “They’ve died outside, and now they’re decomposing outside.”
Her body of work before George Mason was tracking the highest-profile cases of mysterious deaths — 28 years as an FBI profiler. She worked the Unabomber, Natalee Holloway, the Green River and Golden State Killers, Zodiac and many others.