Date of Award
1-1-2022
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Public Health (MPH)
Department
School of Public Health
First Advisor
Vasilis V. Vasiliou
Second Advisor
Paul P. Anastas
Abstract
Without the ability to meaningfully detect an environmental contaminant, public health efforts can get behind the curve, and people suffer for it. Industrial polluters are the major source of environmental contamination. Despite regulation, industrial compliance efforts are often limited by the difficulty of getting samples to analyze due to cost and logistical challenges. The current method requires a compliance officer to gather a sample or rely on self-reported measures from the potential polluters. This process can be remarkably costly both in capital and human labor. These issues can be remedied by relying on the domesticated honeybee to gather the “samples.” Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are a species especially well-suited to environmental biomonitoring. Honeybees have a wide forage area in which they fly, crawl, and swim, thus picking up an extensive array of exposures. These exposures can be monitored to gain an understanding of the local exposome of a beehive, thus giving further inference on regional regulatory compliance. While the literature has explored the impact of exposure to the bees, there is little in the way of using the bees to monitor point source pollution in the environment. The studies that do use bees as a biomonitor do not attempt to apply any meaningful spatial resolution to the gathered data to identify a non-compliant environmental actor. This project is an endeavor to use GIS software, public environmental data, and a multi-hive network to produce a method to locate point pollution sources using honeybees as a sentinel species.
Recommended Citation
Rowe, Brady, "Melissa: Monitoring The Environment With Living Investigatory Sentinel Species Apis Mellifera" (2022). Public Health Theses. 2197.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ysphtdl/2197
