ABSTRACT
In Italy the use of honey bees in environmental monitoring goes back to the early 1980s with initiatives to control pesticides in agro-ecosystems.
In a pesticide monitoring station comprising two beehives fitted with underbaskets, a critical threshold of mortality was set of about 350 bees per week per station. Only when this threshold was exceeded were chemical analyses performed on the dead bees to determine the active ingredients responsible for their death. The two sets of data, mortality and residues, were processed using the Index of Environmental Hazard (IEH), which allows monthly assessments of the level of environmental contamination in the area investigated.
