Utilisation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for the quality assessment of wood is basically a bionic concept which is inspired by the impressive achievements of insects in performing this task just by olfaction in order to exploit wood as a resource. The word “bionics” is made up of the two words “biology” and “electronics”. In German, however, the second part comes from “Technik”, which means engineering in this context. In English, this approach of combining biology and engineering is often also called “biomimetics”. The two expressions are used more or less synonymously. The interdisciplinary field of bionics is about scrutinising and transferring “natural inventions” into technical applications. In the course of evolution, nature has developed, improved and tested these inven-