Over the years, our work with pollutants clearly showed that pollen was a  
route of entry of many things into the hives, especially anything in particulate 
 form.  Whereas some chemicals are systemically translocated into pollen,  
much of what we saw were particles interspersed among the pollen grains.  
 
This was especially pronounced in the case of heavy metals like lead,  
arsenics, cadmium - in bee colonies in semi-arid regions, where as the weather  got 
dry and windy, air-borne dust fell on the the flowers, and the pollen, more  
than the nectar, became contaminated.  Some good rains would usually end  any 
bee loss problems -- we saw many cases of accumulation of metals in beehives  
to toxic levels during these periods.  For the most part, the source of the  
contaminants was industrial and vehicle pollution (smelters, lead in gas,  
cadmium from tires, composted materials used as fertilizers).
 
The Italians were the first to demonstrate that honey bees and pollen could  
be used to detect the presence of phytopathogenic microoranisms in the  
environment (Porrina et al., 2002; Merighi et al., 1999, 2000).  They  showed that 
bee gathered pollen could be used for prevention and to help in  
epidemiological studies of Erwinia amylovora (a bacterium caused severe disease  among 
Rosaceae, Fire Blight).  The study was based on the assumption that  bees might 
spread the disease by carrying the bacteria, but turning this around  so that the 
bees were used to provide the earliest indication of a pending  outbreak.
 
We later conducted and published several studies on the electrostatic  uptake 
of small particles (from microbeads to bacteria to virus) by bees, even  
modeling the rate of uptake and the phenomena of adsorbing onto the body of the  
bee relative to particle size and the charge on the bee (Lighthart et al. in  
early 2000s).
 
For what its worth. 
 
Jerry
 
 
 



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