Джереми Кларксон предупредил о планах военных использовать зараженных пчел для уничтожения человечества

Jeremy Clarkson has revealed his fears that diseased bees could soon be employed by military chiefs and end up destroying humanity. But it’s not the first time there have been schemes to use all sorts of creepy critters in conflict, as we reveal below. Bee afraid In ancient battles the Tiv people of Nigeria are believed to have used special horns filled with bees to direct swarms at their enemies, while the ancient Mayans of Central America used bee grenades as early as 2600BC. Roman armies would catapult whole beehives at cities and rival ships. England’s Richard the Lionheart used a similar tactic against the Saracens in the Siege of Acre, during the Third Crusade in the 12 th century. And in the Vietnam War, US forces encountered booby traps with tripwires that would unleash ferocious bees. Scary tail The Romans were on the sharp end of some bug warfare themselves. When they tried to dig tunnels under the walls of Eupatoria in Crimea, being held by King Mithridates of Pontus, he discovered them and filled the tunnels with bees, thwarting the attackers. In 198AD Parthian defenders of the town of Hatra, in modern day Iraq, successfully fought off forces under Emperor Septimius Severus by throwing down pots containing scorpions at the invaders from the walls of their city. Fly-ing bombs During World War Two a shadowy Japanese body, called Unit 731, was formed, aimed at developing biological weapons. They created bombs which contained fleas or flies infected with plague or cholera which were then dropped over Chinese cities. The pest-filled projectiles are reckoned to have led to the deaths of over 400,000 people. Beetle mania In the same conflict the Germans came up with a secret plan to drop Colorado potato beetles, a major pest for crops, on British farms to devastate the nation’s agriculture, though the dastardly scheme was never implemented. The French also considered using the tactic against Hitler’s Germany. During the Cold War, with little evidence, the Communist East Germans accused the US of dropping the beetles over their crops. Bite nasty In the 1950s the American military came up with a plan to produce 100 million yellow-fever-infected mosquitoes a month and identified potential sites in the Soviet Union as targets. Operation Big Buzz, in 1955, saw them secretly test their plans to use mozzies for warfare by dropping 300,000 uninfected ones over the US state Georgia, proving they could survive to bite humans. The Soviets themselves experimented with using infected ticks to spread disease.