The use of honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) to monitor airborne particulate matter and assess health effects on pollinators

Abstract

The honey bee Apis mellifera has long been recognized as an ideal bioindicator for environmental pollution. These insects are exposed to pollutants during their foraging activities, making them effective samplers of environmental contaminants, including heavy metals, pesticides, radionuclides, and volatile organic compounds. Recently, it has been demonstrated that honey bees can be a valuable tool for monitoring and studying airborne PM pollution, a complex mixture of particles suspended in the air, known to have detrimental effects on human health. Airborne particles attached to the bees can be characterised for their morphology, size, and chemical composition using a scanning electron microscopy coupled with X-ray spectroscopy, thus providing key information on the emission sources of the particles, their environmental fate, and the potential to elicit inflammatory injury, oxidative damage, and other health effects in living organisms. Here, we present a comprehensive summary of the studies involving the use of honey bees to monitor airborne PM, including the limits of this approach and possible perspectives. The use of honey bees as a model organism for ecotoxicological studies involving pollutant PM is also presented and discussed, further highlighting the role of the bees as a cornerstone of human, animal, and environmental health, according to the principles of the “One Health” approach.

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