The comments about lead from "motor traffic" caught my eye.
One won't find much heavy metals anywhere except near very specific places
that are well OUTSIDE major cities - the small airports, heavy industrial
plants, coal-fired power-plants, incinerators, and seaports visited by one
of the 16 massive container cargo ships that burn the very dirty "bunker
oil" (and thus, pollute more than all the cars on the planet combined).
> Bees and bee products from urban and industrial environments
> are far more likely to be contaminated by heavy metals:
"Industry" long ago sold their urban factory sites to residential
developers, who converted them to kitschy condos. Checking the references
cited, the locations misidentified as "urban" were consistently at airports,
or near heavy industry. These are in the outer suburbs and rural areas,
never near cities.
> Lead (Pb) and cadmium (Cd) are considered the principle toxic heavy
metals...
LET'S LEAD OFF WITH LEAD
=======================
> Lead, contained in the air and originating mainly from motor traffic...
> ... care should be taken to harvest [propolis] in areas that are at
> least 3 km away from motor car traffic...
Completely out-of-date.
Lead was outlawed as a gasoline additive in the USA in 1986, as it was
literally destroying lives.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-vi
olent-crime-epidemic/
http://tinyurl.com/bzddefv
Only Algeria, Yemen, and Iraq still permit leaded gas.
http://www.unep.org/Transport/new/PCFV/pdf/Maps_Matrices/world/lead/MapWorld
Lead_June2016.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/j8hwqqb
I know this well - I had to pull the heads and pay a machinist to put
hardened valve seats into both the MG ('52) and the Jag ('63), as without
lead ("Tetraethyl Lead"), valve seats on classic cars will wear away to
nothing. Diesel fuel never had lead added to it. Some racing gas still has
lead, but the only significant source of lead outside of heavy-industrial
pollution is "aviation gas", used in non-turbine, non-jet aircraft engines
on the smallest private planes ("general aviation"). Jets and turboprops
use kerosene-based jet fuel, which has no lead, but has that "I love the
smell of jet fuel in the morning" odor.
So, where do the bulk of these "general aviation" pilots fly and land? Not
at major urban airports, and not over major urban centers. A single-engine
aircraft would jam up the pattern at a big airport. Jets and turboprops
land at 150-170 knots. A single-engine piston aircraft would come in 100
knots at most, and most small planes lack transponders required to fly
anywhere near major urban areas, "Class C Transponders". This is why
"general aviation" airports are in the suburbs and rural areas. So it is
suburban and rural beekeepers that need to worry about lead, not urban
beekeepers.
http://www.ceh.org/avgas/
> "Cadmium and Pb [lead] levels were found to be
> significantly higher in urban areas than in
> nonresidential areas (Perugini et al., 2011)"
The paper quoted, when read, explains:
"...hives located in Ciampino area (Rome), next to the airport."
Ciampino airport (which has the amusing IATA luggage-tag code "CIA") is the
general-aviation airport, no surprise. It is a minimum 30 euro / 45 minute
shuttle ride away from Rome. The usual Rome multi-hour traffic jam explains
Ryanair and EasyJet's low fares - they land at CIA. Beekeepers in the city
of Rome have nothing to fear from this airport. The major airlines fly into
da Vinci airport, which has express train service to Stazione Termini.
(When in Rome, walk and use the metro!)
> "In semirural areas and high vehicle emission places in
> Brazil, Cd and Pb concentrations in pollen were much
> higher compared to countrysides (Morgano et al., 2010)"
As Brazil banned leaded gas in 1989, one might wonder why there would be a
heavy metals problem. Brazil has many small-scale smelters in their eastern
towns. The Boquira lead deposit in the state of Bahia is very large, and
lead is a major export for Brazil. The phrase "high vehicle emission places"
seems to be an error. The sources of lead are Brazil's many small smelters,
not cars.
http://www.borgenmagazine.com/lead-poisoning-brazil/
CADMIUM
=========
Cadmium and such are produced by of incinerators, coal-fired power plants,
and the burning of waste-oil. Here in the city, there wasn't a choice -
buildings have been forced by economics and strict clean-air regulations to
replace fuel-oil burners with natural gas, or simply hook up to Con Edison's
steam pipes.
https://www3.epa.gov/airquality/combustion/
"For 86 percent of all boilers in the United States, these rules would not
apply, because these boilers burn clean natural gas at area source
facilities and emit little pollution.... For the highest emitting 0.4
percent of all boilers in the United States, including boilers located at
refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities, EPA is
proposing more targeted revised emissions limits..."
New York was even more draconian than the EPA in 2011, but the city itself
was the big polluter at its own buildings. The sales value of "views" and
"rooftop gardens" prompted most buildings to "go green" long before the city
regulations. http://www.nyc.gov/html/gbee/html/codes/heating.shtml
"INDUSTRIAL" is not "URBAN"
=========================
> the content of Pb and Cd in bee tissues from industrialized regions
> can be as much as ten times of those from unindustrialized areas
> colonies placed near industrialized regions where high
> concentrations of arsenic and Cd co-occurred.
The two quotes above are more accurate wording of the facts. It is the
"industrial" impact on the environment that should cause concern. Modern
megacities do not tend to have heavy industry, as it upsets the hipsters,
who ironically enjoy "heavy metal" and "industrial" music, but not the
actual metals or industry.
DESPAIR NOT
===========
Actually reading the papers cited show that even a beekeeper near heavy
industry does not have to give up beekeeping.
For example, consider "Contaminants of Bee Products" Stefan Bogdanov,
Apidologie 37 (2006) 1-18
This review paper failed to consider that many of the older papers it
reviewed were too old to have valid data, given the generally improving
environmental quality of the "first-world nations", hence the misstatements
about "motor car traffic". But even then, honey is fairly safe from heavy
metals contamination.
"Generally, [lead] is not transported by plants"
"[Lead] contamination is expected to diminish, due to the increased
world-wide use of car-engine catalysts. ...a decrease
of the Pb honey concentration was documented in Switzerland. In honey
harvested in 1984 the average Pb concentration in honey was 0.2 mg/kg
(Bogdanov et al., 1986). In honey harvested between 2000 to 2002 it was 0.04
mg/kg"
"...[Cadnium] originating from metal industry and incinerators, is
transported from the soil to plants and can then contaminate
nectar and honeydew."
"The great majority of the Pb and Cd values in honey, reviewed in Table I
are well below the MRL (Maximum Residue Limit) values of 0.1 mg/kg for Cd
and 1 mg/kg, proposed for the EU (EC, 2000a)"
"The relatively low contamination of honey is probably due to "filtering" by
the bees since honey has a considerably lower heavy
metal content than bees".
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