Biodetective bees.

• Position: Environment - Using bees to monitor air quality - Brief article

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some German airports have come up with a new approach to monitoring air quality: using bees as "biodetectives" by regularly testing their honey for toxins. At the Dusseldorf airport, honey from 200,000 bees tested in June indicated that toxins were far below official limits. Could bees be modern-day sentinels like the canaries once used to warn of toxic gases in coal mines? Biomonitoring, or the use of living organisms to test environmental health, is still a new field, and the seven German airports using bees as environmental police are not going to replace...