ArticleThe Science of the total environment2022
Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence.
Article in The Science of the total environment, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Distributed Artificial Intelligence for Organizational and Behavioral Recognition of Bees and Ants.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A method for detecting transgenic rapeseed using pollen collected by Apis mellifera L.Transgenic research · 2025Article
- Harnessing Electrostatic Forces: A Review of Bees as Bioindicators for Particulate Matter Detection.Insects · 2025Review
- Article
- Holobiont Urbanism: sampling urban beehives reveals cities' metagenomes.Environmental microbiome · 2023Article
- Antimicrobial-Resistant Environmental Bacteria Isolated Using a Network of Honey Bee Colonies (Transboundary and emerging diseases · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Airflows sustain the infection spread, and in densely urbanized areas airborne particulate matters (PMs) are deemed to aggravate the viral transmission. Apis mellifera colonies are used as bioindicators as they allow environmental sampling of different nature, PMs included. This experiment demonstrates for the first time the possible use of honey bee colonies in the SARS-CoV-2 monitoring. The trial was conducted in Bologna on 18 March 2021, when the third wave of the Italian pandemic was at its peak and environmental conditions allowed high PM concentrations in the air. Sterile swabs were lined up at the hive entrance to sample the dusty material on the body of returning foragers. All of them resulted positive for the target genes of viral SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Likewise, internal samples were taken, but they resulted in no amplification of the target sequences. This experiment does not support speculations about the role of honey bees or their products in SARS-CoV-2 transmission. However, it indicates a novel use of A. mellifera colonies in the environmental detection of airborne human pathogens, at least in a densely urbanized area, deserving better understanding and possible integration with data from automatic air samplers.
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Registered trials
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