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.