Critical links between biodiversity and health in wild bee conservation

Wild bee populations are declining due to human activities, such as land use change, which strongly affect the composition and diversity of available plants and food sources. The chemical composition of food (i.e., nutrition) in turn determines the health, resilience, and fitness of bees. For pollinators, however, the term 'health' is recent and is subject to debate, as is the interaction between nutrition and wild bee health. We define bee health as a multidimensional concept in a novel integrative framework linking bee biological traits (physiology, stoichiometry, and disease) and environmental factors (floral diversity and nutritional landscapes). Linking information on tolerated nutritional niches and health in different bee species will allow us to better predict their distribution and responses to environmental change, and thus support wild pollinator conservation.

Depleted uranium particles in selected Kosovo samples

Selected soil samples, collected in Kosovo locations where DU ammunition was expended during the 1999 Balkan conflict, have been investigated by secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), X-ray fluorescence imaging using a micro-beam (micro-XRF) and scanning electron microscopy equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence detector (SEM-EDXRF), with the objective to test the suitability of these techniques to identify the presence of small DU particles and measure their size distribution and the 235U/238U isotopic ratio (SIMS). Although the results do not permit any legitimate extrapolation to all the sites hit by the DU rounds used during the conflict, they indicated that there can be "spots ' where hundreds of thousands of particles may be present in a few milligrams of DU contaminated soil. The particle size distribution showed that most of the DU particles were <5 microm in diameter and more than 50% of the particles had a diameter <1.5 microm. Knowledge on DU particles is needed as a basis for the assessment of the potential environmental and health impacts of military use of DU, since it provides information on possible re-suspension and inhalation.