HONEY AS A TOOL FOR MONITORING AIR QUALITY AND POLLUTION AT HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION

Anthropogenic activities generate metal, acid, and particulate air pollutants which negatively impact human and ecological services. In the United States, power plant, industrial, and vehicle emissions are leading causes of air pollution, however, the measurement of air pollution at high resolution spatial regimes remains a challenge. Honey has emerged as a powerful biomonitoring tool to effectively quantify contaminants without the need for a large array of monitoring instruments. I hypothesize that honey can be used to effectively measure and map modern air pollutant spatiotemporal relationships over the Eastern U.S. and expect heightened concentrations in urban areas. Using ion chromatography and sulfate as an indicator for air pollution, I find sulfate concentrations of honey to range from 47.5 to 686 mg/L. The spatial trend was consistent with National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) monitoring stations, though the honey values were significantly larger than NADP station values. Utilizing a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and electron dispersive microscopy (EDS), I observed agglomerations of hundreds of nano-sized magnetic spherules with compositions almost entirely consisting of Fe₃O₄. The results indicate that honey does reflect the expected regional trends in air pollutants, and there may be concentrations of harmful emission products within honey that may be negatively impactful to bee and insect health. My study constructs the first sulfate pollution profile of the eastern U.S. using honey and demonstrates the presence of metal particulate pollution in honey for the first time.