Honey as a biomonitor for a changing world

Smith, Kennan T.; Weis, Dominique; Amini, Marghaleray; Shiel, Alyssa E.; Lai, Vivian; Gordon, Kathy

doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0243-0

Cited by 66 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 87 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Rising out of the need to develop new and innovative approaches to assessing temporal and spatial shifts in contaminants has been the use of terrestrial biomarkers, which are relatively easy to collect and analyze but provide dense data. Examples that people can readily connect environment to contamination include the use of historic lichens and fungi (e.g., Flegal et al, 2010;Wu et al, 2017), decadal records of stored red wine (Kristensen et al, 2016;Medina et al, 2000), and bees and honey (Zhou et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2019). These studies show unequivocally that environmental contamination since the industrial revolution has grossly contamination urban environments , with distal oceans and ice masses being affected but to a much lesser extent (McConnell et al, 2014;More et al, 2017;Ndungu et al, 2016).…”

Section: Case Study 2 Pollution Biosensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Approaches to Identifying and Reducing the Global Burden of Disease From Pollution

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pollution from multiple sources causes significant disease and death worldwide. Some sources are legacy, such as heavy metals accumulated in soils, and some are current, such as particulate matter. Because the global burden of disease from pollution is so high, it is important to identify legacy and current sources and to develop and implement effective techniques to reduce human exposure. But many limitations exist in our understanding of the distribution and transport processes of pollutants themselves, as well as the complicated overprint of human behavior and susceptibility. New approaches are being developed to identify and eliminate pollution in multiple environments. Community-scale detection of geogenic arsenic and fluoride in Bangladesh is helping to map the distribution of these harmful elements in drinking water. Biosensors such as bees and their honey are being used to measure heavy metal contamination in cities such as Vancouver and Sydney. Drone-based remote sensors are being used to map metal hot spots in soils from former mining regions in Zambia and Mozambique. The explosion of low-cost air monitors has allowed researchers to build dense air quality sensing networks to capture ephemeral and local releases of harmful materials, building on other developments in personal exposure sensing. And citizen science is helping communities without adequate resources measure their own environments and in this way gain agency in controlling local pollution exposure sources and/or alerting authorities to environmental hazards. The future of GeoHealth will depend on building on these developments and others to protect a growing population from multiple pollution exposure risks. Plain Language SummaryThe health burdens of legacy contaminants, and the continuing global health burdens of current pollution, are crippling both global health and well-being. Much of the exposure science on these relatively well-studied pollutants is known, as is the general toxicity of past pollutants. But there is a great distance between understanding the toxicity and exposure sources of environmental pollutants and applying that knowledge in practical and just ways. This contribution summarizes several major repositories and ongoing sources of soil, dust, and air pollution and addresses the harmful effects from exposure to these. We also highlight some examples of the future of GeoHealth research in this area by providing case studies of current novel approaches that focus on bridging the science of pollution sources and distribution with real applications at the community level to reduce pollution's role in the global burden of disease.

show abstract

Section: Case Study 2 Pollution Biosensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Approaches to Identifying and Reducing the Global Burden of Disease From Pollution

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Among the pollutants, pesticides used in agriculture have gained the most attention because pollinators visit crop plants or wild flowers growing near arable fields and are confronted with those chemicals when collecting food ( Figure 1) [59][60][61][62]. Heavy metals are a second group of pollutants that may threaten social insects in agricultural regions, but also in more urbanized or industrial areas [31,35,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71]. Heavy metals are present in soils (either naturally or due to pollution) and can potentially lead to contamination of the nests of social insects, or they may move up the food chain ( Figure 2).…”

Section: Major Classes Of Pollutants Threatening Social Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Plants may take up heavy metals which, in turn, are ingested by social bees collecting pollen and nectar. Also, other herbivorous insects serving as prey for social wasps may accumulate these pollutants, which may result in the increased exposure of these predatory wasps to heavy metals [35,36,47,63,65,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. Pesticides (or their residues) and heavy metals, as well as other pollutants from combustion, traffic, agriculture, and coal mining, can also form or bind to fine particulate matter [66,[81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91] that pollutes the air.…”

Section: Major Classes Of Pollutants Threatening Social Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In honeybees and wild bees (including bumblebees), the detrimental effects of pesticides and insecticides have been studied as non-target effects on these important pollinators, and thus, in the light of conservation. In addition, the accumulation of pesticides (and to a lesser extent, heavy metals) in beeswax and honey has received much attention [31,37,38,40,70,[99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107]. Since pollutants may reach the human consumer via these bee products, they may be used for biomonitoring of the environment, and most importantly, may mediate detrimental effects upon offspring, resulting in colony-level detrimental effects.…”

Section: Major Classes Of Pollutants Threatening Social Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In comparison to pesticide effects, the health effects of heavy metals have received much less attention (Figure 2). Of the existing studies, many have established that heavy metals are often present in the nest matrices in ants and the wax combs or honey in bees in polluted areas [31,35,63,65,67,[69][70][71]75,78,102,[121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130]. While many social Hymenoptera may be confronted with heavy metal pollution in strongly human-influenced environments, relatively little data exists on the potential detrimental health effects in comparison to pesticide effects.…”

Section: Major Classes Of Pollutants Threatening Social Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Pollutants and Their Interaction with Diseases of Social Hymenoptera

Feldhaar

Otti

2020

Insects

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many insect species, including social insects, are currently declining in abundance and diversity. Pollutants such as pesticides, heavy metals, or airborne fine particulate matter from agricultural and industrial sources are among the factors driving this decline. While these pollutants can have direct detrimental effects, they can also result in negative interactive effects when social insects are simultaneously exposed to multiple stressors. For example, sublethal effects of pollutants can increase the disease susceptibility of social insects, and thereby jeopardize their survival. Here we review how pesticides, heavy metals, or airborne fine particulate matter interact with social insect physiology and especially the insects’ immune system. We then give an overview of the current knowledge of the interactive effects of these pollutants with pathogens or parasites. While the effects of pesticide exposure on social insects and their interactions with pathogens have been relatively well studied, the effects of other pollutants, such as heavy metals in soil or fine particulate matter from combustion, vehicular transport, agriculture, and coal mining are still largely unknown. We therefore provide an overview of urgently needed knowledge in order to mitigate the decline of social insects.

show abstract

Minerals and Trace Elements

Solayman¹

2023

Honey

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Honey as a biomonitor for a changing world

Cited by 66 publications

References 87 publications

New Approaches to Identifying and Reducing the Global Burden of Disease From Pollution

New Approaches to Identifying and Reducing the Global Burden of Disease From Pollution

Pollutants and Their Interaction with Diseases of Social Hymenoptera

Minerals and Trace Elements

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About