The following article appeared in the "Albuquerque Journal", July 13, 1997, page B2. I thought it would be of interest to the list. Please excuse any typos. QUOTE HONEYBEES TRACK LAB ACTIVITY Researchers Want to Know Why Levels Appear Low by Ian Hoffman, Journal Northern Bureau "Tim Haarmann's honeybees are full of the stuff of thermonuclear weapons. No surprise - the bees drink and cool their hives from a waste lagoon at one of Los Alamos National Laboratory's "hottest" facilities. Plus they feed on pollen and nectar from nearby wildflowers. Haarmann's bees at LANL are just like any other honeybees: they flit about, they make wax and honey, they feed the queen. His hives at the lab appear as healthy as "normal" hives he keeps at home near Jemez Springs. They're just radioactive. And while the lab bees don't glow, they could shed light [was this an intentional pun?] on ways byproducts of nuclear of nuclear research travel through the environment. That makes the bees watchdogs for a larger family of plants and animals. Haarmann has posted his environmental sentinels near wastewater lagoons for the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center partly because its linear accelerator has some of the lab's highest radioactive emissions. The water - and the bees - contain traces of various radioactive elements and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is a key ingredient in thermonuclear weapons, as well as a signature pollutant from nuclear work. "Its an ecotoxicologist's dream to have this experimental ground to work on" said Haarmann, a lab ecologist. He just set up new hives at area G, the lab's storage area for radioactive waste. Other lab ecologists grow fruits and vegetables. They trap small animals. They test milk from a nearby dairy and from goats. If a car hits an elk or deer on lab land, a team is called out to cut shoulder muscle and bone from the road kill - all trying to figure out [continued on page B7] whether and how radioactive particles are getting into plants and animals. Haarmann's bees are modern-day canaries in a gold mine, keeping watch on radioactive pollution from way down the food chain. Haarmann vacuums honeybees from the hive, euthanizes them with ether, freezes them and hands them to lab technicians. They grind the bees into a soup and run it through a spectrometer to "see" the amounts of radioactive particles or radionuclides. "We have levels (of radioactivity), but what the heck does that mean to the bees or to the birds that feed on them?", Haarmann said. So far, the levels of radionuclides in the honeybees are low, he said. Much of Haarmann's detective work is aimed at figuring out why. He's found, for example, that bees get rid of some tritium in their bodies through respiration; it scatters in the air as they fly. [Are their bee wind tunnels?] "We're stuck with these low enough levels where I don't think there's any health effect for the bees", he said. "What I'm worried about is the entire movement of contaminants throughout the ecosystem so we can ensure the protection of those animals/" ENVIRONMENTAL SENTINELS Haarmann wants to know how the various flowers the bees rely upon for food take up radio active particles from the environment, whether some tend to concentrate those particles and others filter them. He also is trying to understand what may happen to birds or worms that eat the bees, whether eating them could magnify those contaminants. As sentinels against pollution, "insects are where it's at," Haarmann said. After all, he noted, most of the world's animals are insects. Humans have looked to honeybees as barometers of change for centuries. Calendars from the Middle Ages foretold war, pestilence and famine based on bee behaviour. Honeybees began signalling problems in the environment in the late 1800s, when farmers began spraying insecticides that contained trace metals, said biology professor Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana. A German beekeeper made the first connection between bee health and polluting metals in 1914; he sued a silverworks on the Rhine River for killing his bees. Researchers began using honeybees as biological sentinels in 1930s, to study the impacts of ore smelters in Utah, Texas, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Europe. Entomologists think honeybees originated in Afghanistan. Human love of honey has carried them across most of the world. For Bromenshenk, those millions of bee colonies are a global monitoring network for the health of ecosystems. The reason: Bees pick up lots of stuff on their daily dorties, then haul it back to the hive. Honeybees are uniquely equipped for this: They are covered in tiny, branched hairs, making them like airborne balls of Velcro. Plus, scientists believe bees' bodies carry electrostatic charges, putting static cling to work carrying food, water and whatnot. Bromenshenk call them "nature's dust mop". YEARS OF STUDY For more than 20 years, Bromenshenk and colleagues have studied how bees harvest hundreds of contaminants and how those contaminants affect the various castes of bees back at the hive - foragers, nurse bees, drones and the queen. They've used sophisticated sensors to guage the health of the colonies and count every coming and going of the foragers - the females who hunt food and water up to three miles from the hive. Tiny screens at the hive entrance scrape pollen and other things from the foragers for chemical analysis. They drill holes into the hives, insert a pipe and run spectroscopic tests on the air inside. They've found that bees tend to concentrate pollutants in the hives, where they can be measured even when manmade instruments on the outside detect nothing. What they've found is intriguing for the US Army. Bromenshenk's bees are monitoring heavy metals pollution at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where the Army used to make chemical weapons and still stores mustard gas. "It's this broad screening we're excited about," said biologist and contract officer Tom Shedd of the US Army's Center for Environmental Health Research at Fort Detrick, Mc. As fast as the science of bee biomonitoring is expanding, there's still plenty of research to be done. And much of it concerns radionuclides. "There certainly are lots and lots of questions about how bees take them up and what happens to them in the hive," Bromenshenk said. That's where Haarmann's research comes in. He's not interested in whether pollutants could reach humans but how the ecosystem is affected by them. "The truth is we don't have a complete understanding of the movement of all these different radionuclides through different plants and animals," Haarmann said. "We measure these bees or a mouse to see what the levels of contaminants are. But what does that mean? Does it come from the soils, or from the water or the plants they're eating? There are a few things we need to understand before we can use these numbers. I think we will get to that point some day." end Quote The writer must get paid by the word. For those interested in responding to the newspaper and/or the writer, the address is: http://www.abqjournal.com or PO Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103 or 7777 Jefferson NE, 87109 Lawrence W. Thompson Montgomery, Al.