<How does benzene get in the hives? Does it drift in with the air exchange
or do bees bring it in?> Probably both, but I suspect much of it comes in
INSIDE the bee.
Are there any guidelines for how far hives need to be from highways, dry
cleaner's etc.?
With heavier material like metals, colonies immediately adjacent pick up
more than colonies farther away - short distances can make a big difference,
since particle adhered contaminants are heavy, drop out closer to the
source.
With volatile and semi-volatile chemicals, you are MUCH more likely to get
area dispersion that can go for miles - we've followed flouride over 100
miles from its source (i.e. phosphate plant).
<Also is urban and suburban honey too contaminated for human consumption?>
Good question Honey is usually free of many pollutants, probably due to
the nectaries being somewhat shielded from aerosol deposition and the ability
of bees to filter particles out of nectar.
Pollen, on the other hand, can be highly contaminated.
<They found the honey from Paris colonies to be less polluted than the
honey
from the big ag areas in France. Paris has banned all garden chems but
vehicular emissions are still there.>
That's an impossible statement - likely to be comparing apples to oranges.
The contaminants common to ag areas are likely to include fertilizers,
pesticides, and other chemicals that are less common in urban areas OR more
localized to garden plots. Urban areas tend to be large scale sources of
industrial chemicals, contaminants from traffic, etc.
That said, even the most remote rural areas will still show breakdown
products from burning of gasoline and diesel - many of these materials can be
carried long distances, and there are multiple small sources.
My point, I could easily pick a suite of chemicals common to urban areas,
uncommon in ag areas, and vice versa.
Each has their own unique contaminants, and each has some that are shared.
In general, remote ag areas like our rangelands of MT tend to use far less
pesticide and are far removed from most urban and industrial chemicals. If
I'm going to consume pollen, that's the place to harvest it.
But, if you pick the Anaconda valley near the old copper smelter - I
wouldn't touch the pollen, even though the area is relatively sparse with
respect to urban sources, and both the phosphate plant and copper smelter have
been shut down for some time - but the lead, cadmium, copper, zinc persist in
the soils - again, I've traced the plumes for many miles. As you follow a
plume from a smokestack, the chemicals change with distance - heavy metals
drop out first (things like lead), metals like cadmium scatter farther,
arsenic which is often a very fine dust - I've traced from Seattle to British
Columbia, and the gaseous chemicals often follow the terrain, can move
across entire states.
Think about Mt St Helen's - we got a couple inches of ash in Missoula,
MT, over 300 miles away, and the dust kept going east and south - even
Minneapolis got some, as I remember.
My advice, do not collect pollen for human consumption near heavy industry
- smelters, iron works, refineries.
Finally, prevalent winds can make a huge difference. In the Tacoma area,
south of Seattle, emissions from the old Rustin smelter followed the
highway north and south, down past Yelm, north to Canada. But move just a few
miles east or west, and you and the bees were out of the zone of impact.
Jerry
Waldemar
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