Honey bees as bioindicators of environmental pollution

Since 1962, the bee has increasingly been employed to monitor environmental pollution by heavy metals in territorial and urban surveys, pesticides in rural areas and also radionuclide presence in the environment. The bee as biological indicator possesses several important morphological, ecological and behavioural requisites, and man’s beekeeping assures an unlimited supply. The bee acts as a detector of environmental pollution in two ways, as it signals either via high mortality rates the presence of toxic molecules, or via the residues in honey, pollen, and larvae the presence of heavy metals, fungicides and herbicides that are harmless to it. Bee monitoring also contributes to the ecological impact statement by culminat-ing in the charting of environmental health maps, which include such data as mortality rates, apicide number, type and risk-level of molecules detected, and so forth. These general remarks are briefly exemplified by a few of Author’s findings, and by the description of the large scale monitor-ing methodology