Comment by seba_dos1
5 years ago
As the article notes, a much more important thing to consider is how it influences insects working with pollen and producing that honey rather than how it influences humans who consume it.
5 years ago
As the article notes, a much more important thing to consider is how it influences insects working with pollen and producing that honey rather than how it influences humans who consume it.
As an east coast beekeeper, that was certainly the part that interested me. I've looked into other heavy metal accumulation in honey, namely lead from firing range remediation. In several studies the bees didn't seem to be bothered by collecting lead-rich honey from contaminated plants, though I don't remember the duration over which they were monitored.
One of the interesting things with lead is that there are plants more given to storing it in leaves and stalks than flower/nectar/pollen and you can effectively devise a bio-remediation strategy around a few plants, Sunflowers or mustard for instance, that pull up the lead, but don't pass much if any to the honey. The bees stimulate the growth and seed set of the plants, encouraging self-seeding. Nerd-level me would chop and dry the stalks and leaves and test for lead until it fell below the baseline in a few years. You get to fix the soil, while making a valuable product ( once you test the honey for lead as well )
I wonder if similar could be done to pull up the Cesium with Potassium-hungry plants that don't move the Cesium to their flowers. But then how would you dispose of the silage?
Unlike most heavy metals, cesium doesn't really accumulate in the body. Its biological half-life is around 70 days.[1]
Also it's hard to overstate just how little cesium there is in this honey. The EU limit for cesium in baby food & formula is 370Bq/kg[2], almost 20 times greater than the most radioactive honey the researchers found.
The article is really about how sensitive scientific instruments can be, not about any danger to people or nature.
1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Nuclear/biohalf.h...
2. See page 2 of https://web.archive.org/web/20140817002948/http://ec.europa....