Sniffer Bees

Inscentinel's VASOR136 looks a bit like a hand-held hoover, but contains 36 specially trained honeybees that can alert a user to a whole range of dangerous or interesting compounds present in the environment.



Yes, seriously.

One loads up their VASOR136 with cassettes of trained honeybees (36 in total) and takes it into some threatened/interesting location; airport security or a prospective mine perhaps. Through Pavlovian Conditioning (I can't wait to have children), when exposed to ambient air (by default the bees are only exposed to purified air within the hoover VASOR136) the bees will stick their tongues out if whatever substance they're trained to detect is in the air. This is then monitored, and a probabilistic result is displayed to the human overlord.

For maximum accuracy, all 36 bees can be conditioned to one trigger, or for versatility the bees may be grouped into separate sensing groups. You can even bring along spare cassettes of bees to swap in and out as and when needed. Yes, seriously.

And, finally, for those of you concerned about bee welfare, there's a whole section devoted to it here.

Awesome.