Forensic scientist discovered a brand new method that could help them understand the way serial killers’ minds work. They believe that the way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers. “Most murders happen close to the killer’s home, but not in the area directly surrounding a criminal’s house, where crimes are less likely to be committed because of the fear of getting caught by someone they know,” explained Dr Raine.

This method that works very well with bees, is called geographic profiling, and is originally developed by Rossmo back in the 1980’s. GP, as it’s known, has since been adopted by police forces across the world and has been applied in such high profile cases as the BTK Killer and the D.C. Sniper.
Geographic profiling works on the premise that the location of a crime site can provide the police with vital information. It assesses and predicts the offender’s most likely place of residence, place of work, social venues and travel routes etc. GP works on the assumption that, like bees, serial killers don’t work right next to their homes and instead travel to a more distant locations to commit crimes, creating a buffer zone around their home or work. “They want to operate in a comfort zone, close to an area they know but not where everyone knows them,” said Rossmo.

Instead of using information about the distribution of flowers visited by bees to explain the insects’ behaviour, criminologists’ models will use details about crime scenes, robbery locations, abandoned cars, even dead bodies, to hone the search for a suspect.

However, as Dr Raine said, “Bees have much simpler brains and so understanding how bees are recruited to flowers is much easier than understanding the complex thoughts of a serial murderer”

I’d suggest you see those other two videos from BBC as well (for those of you with fast broadband connection and further interest in this methodology):

• How bee foraging can help police
• Brainy Bees Get Radio Tagged

This all sounds very exciting, but will this discovery really be able to shed some light on the way serial killers’ minds work? Maybe after some more scientific researches it’ll prove efficient. As for now, we can’t be sure about that, but this method definitely deserves to be explored.

-articles written by  Jennifer Carpenter, BBC and  Eric Bland, discovery news, rewritten and adapted by administrator-