I HAVE to admit to wincing when I read about the training of bees to detect landmines (“Easy to train and brilliant at finding landmines ... experts turn to plan bee”, The Herald, June 15).

Here we are again, exploiting the innocent.

Two poems from Dame Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The Bees came to mind. In Virgil’s Bees, the last two lines are as follows: “Bees/are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.”

In The Woman in the Moon, Ms Duffy, the first woman and the first Scot to be appointed Britain’s poet laureate, begins her poem with “Darlings, I write to you from the moon” ending with “I gaze, gawp, glare; deserts/where forests were, sick seas.

“When night comes/I see you gaping back as though you hear my Darlings,/what have you done, what have you done to the world”?

Indeed, what have we done and what are we doing to our amazing planet?

How can using the bees, “the batteries of our gardens and orchards”, those beautiful, industrious guarantors of our food supplies, to detect landmines that we have ourselves planted to kill one another, the right thing to do?

The idea might well be clever but it still makes me wince.

Thelma Edwards,

Old Comrades Hall,

Hume,

Kelso.