Who thinks up these ideas?

So, everyone is aware of dogs trained to sniff out drugs, bombs, people, pretty much anything. I didn't realize that it takes on average (at least to one article I just read) $37,000.00 and up to six months to train a dog to perform those tasks. So someone somehow came up with the idea of training bees to sniff out bombs. I guess I never knew that bees have roughly the same sniffing abilities as dogs do.

So, the trainers/teachers put up to 500 bees in what's called a "bee hotel". The bees are then exposed to a smell (like gunpowder for instance) and simultaneously rewarded with a sugary liquid. The process is repeated up to five times, and then the bees associate the smell with the sugary liquid. So the next time the bees smell whatever the odor is, they will stick out their tongues, because they are expecting food. The article doesn't say if the bees can be trained for more than one smell, but I guess they could be.

So then, out of the 500 bees in the bee hotel, 36 bees are then moved to a small hand held device that looks like a vacuum cleaner. The article says the bees "are gently taped down" in the machine that's called a VASOR (for Volatile Analysis by Specific Olfactory Recognition). Then a fan blows air over the immoblized antennae of the bees. If the bees smell something, they will stick their tongues out which breaks the beams of light that are in front of the bees face. Once the beam of light is broken, the bees are fed and the handler is notified that the bees have detected something. According the article since the gadget contains 36 bees, all individually testing the atmosphere, the VASOR offers greater accuracy than a single explosives hound's nose. It also says that the for bees, the training wears off after about 2 weeks. So the bees are used for sniffing for just a couple of days, then the bees are reintroduced to their hive. Are animals amazing or what?