Tracey
Good questions, and thanks for the labels for specific dog scenting behaviors.  We tend to talk about dwell time, drift, density mapping when discussing bees.
We are not using this for the military at the moment, due in part to an incident some years ago when a civilian military scientist went into a partnership with a well-known bee supplier.  They told the military that they could do what we do, but faster, and with the ability to airlift bees into war zones at the drop of a hat.  They then went to demonstrate their bee conditioning and the use of cameras on boom cranes - one trial was at a landmine test field, another at a military base in January.  They failed both times, because they believed, as I later heard from a GSA investigator, 'If a dumb cowboy in MT can do this, we can."   For their January test, they couldn't even get bees to forage at mid-60 degree F.  Plus, they had glass sides in the hives, and in the Yuma sun, the wax in the colonies melted down and flowed out of the entrances. 
Some months later, our military sponsors came back to us, acknowledged that GSA found a problem among their contractors, and they paid us to do a demo, that worked.  That removed the egg from their faces.  However, the new project officer simply wanted to prove that it could work so that the agency could move on to artificial noses, IEDs, and other insect-derived, engineered solutions.
The failure of the competing group left a taint.   In addition, generals initially were slow to adopt dogs, and some still aren't convinced.  Then the Swiss set standards for dogs used in demining, and dogs have now proved themselves in arid war zones.  
But there remains a fear of stinging insects, nonsense about where bees will and will not fly.  Our competitors told the agency that bees flew in a tear-drop cohort.  The UN Deminining folks really liked our bees, but they don't fund research.  They came out to MT for a demonstration and got real excited, thought that bees could speed up the process by 15x less time than dog teams.  The one, large demining company in the US frankly admitted, its a billion dollar a year business, projected to take over 50 years just to catch up with surveying existing minefields, and after all, a dog team could do the work.  Why would they want to clear areas faster?

As per our military-funded work, after the landmine demo failure, DARPA decided to switch from landmines to IEDs, so we had to switch gears - follow the funding.  Again, we had something that worked, but not under the specific conditions that the military wanted.  They wanted bees to search vehicles at checkpoints under tent-like portals.  The problem was too many people at the checkpoint, too short a vehicle stop-time, and a reluctance by the bees to fly under the portals.  However, a 1/4 mile up the road, away from the crowd and portals, the bees were all over vehicles carrying explosives and the drivers.
The military followed the grandmother principles - so many bees at a vehicle or person carrying a bomb, that a vision-impaired grandmother could see it.  The idea that covertly surveying a line of vehicles or a person lined up some distance from a checkpoint was a better and more achievable method was lost on them.  They wanted lots of bees, all at one time, in a crowd.  We can produce a series of bee detections that cause the target to stand out while not tipping off the bomber, but that's difficult in a crowd of people.  Bees aren't real keen on foraging human populations.
I remember going across Hoover dam during the building of the new bridge, with test explosives in the back of my truck.  The vehicle line snaked back and forth through the hills on the final approach to the dam, where we all spent more time stopped or creeping ahead.  That was the perfect scenario for us to have some beehives near the roads and a LIDAR instrument on a nearby hillside.  The bees would have had time to discover the vapor trails, and the lasers or cameras would spot the bees, without anyone realizing that we and our bees were watching.  Not surprisingly, the guards and dogs at the checkpoint entrance to the Hoover dam crossing missed our cargo. 
Finally, whereas I and most of my team would walk across a bee-mapped minefield, convincing others of this isn't easy, despite rigorous testing.  Given that any mistakes could lead to impairments or death, I can understand their reluctance.  Some of our work continued in Europe at a Croatian landmine field.  However, our military never allowed the Croatians to come to the US to see what we could do, and my friend Nikola never had the LIDAR technology that we have for mapping bees.  They were able to demonstrate that conditioned bees can find landmines, but they lacked the ability to safely map the searching bees.
As a fall-back from the explosives works, we shifted to non-lethal applications. We've done work on improving crop pollination efficacy, particularly for seed crops like onions, where the bees at times aren't all that excited about pollinating.  And, we continue to look into the detection and mapping of exotic pests introduced into a country.
Knowing that we have a system that works, it pains me that we couldn't break through the existing paradigms.  It took a long time for dogs to be trusted, we're not there with bees.  It's not a lack of testing, independent assessments; it's a lack of advocates to try something different.
And, I'm getting older every day.  At 75, I worry more about COVID then landmines and bombs, although that changed a bit a couple of weeks ago in D.C.  We'd love to go to Croatia or African and show what we can do, but I will have to defer to my younger research partners or find someone else to take up the cause.
Jerry




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