For over 30 years, our research has been funded by grants and contracts from a variety of agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Energy (DOE), Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service.

Six years ago, we began development of methods to add the capability of detecting and monitoring volatile and semivolatile chemicals in the air inside beehives and real time monitoring of the responses of honey bee colonies to exposures to these and other harmful substances. This work was sponsored by the U.S. Army's Center for Environmental Health Research. They are leaders in the area of health risk assessment research using non-mammalian animal models.

USACEHR has supported the development of both aquatic and terrestrial biomonitoring systems for real time toxicity detection. "A monitoring system for chemical hazards in the environment must be able to detect toxicity caused by unsuspected materials or the interactions of chemicals in complex mixtures; this requires the use of biological sensors."

Less than three years ago, we began a program to augment these capabilities under a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Controlled Biological Systems Program. The Controlled Biological Systems Program "explores the unique sensorimotor performance of biological organisms for Defense applications. Capturing such performance could result in the use of organisms as sentinel species, collecting real time information in the environment about the presence of toxins or other threats. The University of Montana heads a consortium of investigators working on honey bees in this context. The goal is to provide a means of rapidly (real time or close to real time) detecting the presence or introduction of hazardous biological or chemical agents by monitoring the hive or individuals foraging within the hive area(2-5 Km). Specific tasks include:

• Developing the ability to train bees to targets of interest using associative learning;
• Assisting the development of tracking technologies for individual foragers to track and follow bees to sources of toxins;
• Providing markers or taggants for studying bee foraging distributions and to verify target detection;
• Increasing the environmental collection capacity of bees by incorporating materials and or sensor interfaces;
• Increasing the monitoring capability at the hive.

These tasks will be demonstrated in controlled field trials and performed in the context of useful Defense missions. Ongoing work is aimed at conducting validation and demonstration trials at Southwest Research Institute and other sites to demonstrate the capability of bees to find:

• Low concentrations of explosives from UXOs or landmines,
• Biowarfare (BW) agents or BW surrogates,
• Other agents of interest to DARPA.

Monitoring Bioavailable Chemicals

• Honey Bee Colony Distribution, Colony Density, and Performance
  
  
• Pollen and Dust on the Body of a Bee
  
  
• Volatile Organic Chemicals Routinely Sampled Inside Beehives
  
  
• Concentrations of Volatile Organic Chemicals Inside Beehives in Urban Areas of Maryland
  
  
• Concentrations of Inorganic Chemicals in Bees and Pollen in Urban Areas of Maryland
  
  
• High and Low Concentrations of Inorganic Chemicals in Bees from Industrial Areas of the Western U.S.
  
  
• Concentrations of 137 Cesium in Honeydew Honey from the Alps

Real-Time Monitoring of Honey Bee Colony Populations

• Monitoring Honey Bee Colony Population Dynamics
  
  
• Real Time Monitoring of Colony Flight Activity