Bees keep you safe

Ecosystems (the mechanisms working to make our home) need to be maintained.

You need to understand the big ideas:

1) Energy comes from the sun, and everything needs energy

2) Big fish eating little fish, extends to a food chain.

3) Things eating more than one food source are more flexible and the entire ecosystem and adapt.

4) introduced species (cane toads) can be a real pest.

5) we can monitor our environment by Bioindicators to stop disasters, and protect ourselves.

Today I visited ANSTO at Lucas Heights. ANSTO gives Australia Nuclear knowhow for good. It may be to protect us from polluters, cure cancers, or basically put smarts into how we run Australia. Henk is an ANSTO scientist who is giving back to Australia by working with teachers and students at Penrith High. He read our Science Blog about Bees and their ecosystem and explained how ANSTO used local bee hives as ultra sensitive industrial waste scouts.

Imagine a map of an area covering a 2 km radius and the bee hive in the center. Imagine areas with particular flowering plants highlighted, and then imagine this animated to cover different areas as the year progresses and  different plants come into flower.  Henk's team collect the pollen that drops as little balls as the bees land at the hive.  Analyse the pollen for pollution and you have a great detector, and free honey.

There is only one problem,  pollution to flower to bee means that you get only the tiniest samples, and you want to nail the tiniest traces. You want super early warning.  Classic chemistry will loose these traces, you want to find atoms that jump up and down and wave at you... atoms that tell you they are there.



Here you can see the radiation rays shot out of ordinary rocks. A pollen clump will have much less than this, but by watching the radiation it is as if the pollen can mobile phone the information, some information gives the type of pollution, some the source, and some the date.  ANSTO plays "Cludo" with the periodic table, to keep your food and water safe, put polluters behind bars, and remove some of the guess work from saving the planet.

You can look at the population of bees as an indicator, move to looking at how they act as a bioindicator, or go even one step further get them working for you as field researchers.