Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode of the podcast.

A lot of non-human animals are smarter than we give them credit for and can be taught

all kinds of things, if properly motivated.

In this one, we explore how researchers have made educational inroads with bees.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

Back in 1988, two entomologists, Joe Lewis and Jim Tumlinson joined in a project that,

for the first time, uncovered the ability of an insect to learn through association.

It was, at the time, not only novel, it was an out-and-out revelation.

An insect, in this case, the parasitic wasp, which feeds on and eventually kills certain

agricultural pests, could learn in a most basic way.

Think Pavlov's dogs except smaller and busier.

From that study and other similar research, by, for example, DARPA, the U.S. Department

of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we have spun forward to the point where

honeybees now have successfully sniffed out long-buried landmines in Croatia.

That's a long way from some 30 years ago when Lewis and Tumlinson released their findings

in Nature Magazine to the astonishment of many.

Lewis said, you talk about training an insect period and you get the look.

The eyes start narrowing. It just doesn't make sense.

So how did they start making sense of it?

Let's talk about associative learning.

The whole idea behind this is fairly simple, even if no one dreamed decades ago that insects

...