Dvyliuk and Kovalchuk 2019 - Bee tissue metals after Sumerian Silver feeding

Dvyliuk and Kovalchuk fed isolated honey bees sugar syrup with a silver and copper citrate preparation and measured bee survival plus Ag, Cu, Fe, Zn, and Co in bee tissues. This is in-scope a4 animal biomarker/toxicology context and feed-to-bee transfer evidence, not honey occurrence or chromium occurrence.

Key numbers

The preparation called “Sumerian Silver” is described as a citrate solution containing active silver 250 mg/L and copper 250 mg/L. The five bee groups received: control 1 mL 50% sugar syrup plus 1 mL water; group II 1 mL 50% sugar syrup plus 1 mL Sumerian Silver at 1:10; group III at 1:100; group IV at 1:200; and group V at 1:500.

Table 1 reports survival after 10 days:

Table 2 reports mineral elements in honey-bee body tissues, mg/kg natural mass, M +/- m, n = 3:

The paper states that feeding the 1:10 preparation produced the lowest bee survival and the highest mortality by day 10, while the 1:100, 1:200, and 1:500 dilutions did not show toxic effects during the first four days. The authors report significant increases in bee-tissue Cu and Ag in all treatment groups relative to control, lower Fe and Zn in several groups, and higher Co in groups IV and V.

Methods (brief)

The study used five groups of isolated Carpathian honey bees held in thermostat cages at 30 degrees C and 60-80% relative humidity for 10 days. The authors counted live and dead bees daily and collected 50 bees per group on day 10 for tissue metal analysis. Ag, Cu, Fe, Zn, and Co in bee tissues were measured by atomic-absorption spectrophotometry on an SF-115 PK instrument. Results were processed in Microsoft Excel with Student’s t-test.

Implications

Certification: Do not use these values as honey occurrence, chromium occurrence, or consumer-product contamination. They are bee-tissue biomarker values after experimental feeding with a metal-containing preparation.

Courses: Useful example of why animal-feed additives and apicultural treatments can change tissue metal burdens without directly measuring honey or other bee products.

App: Context only. The source may support honey-supply-chain questions about bee treatments and biomarker transfer, but it does not provide a honey concentration value.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• silver
• copper
• iron
• zinc
• cobalt

Verification notes

Recovered from skip:not-food-occurrence under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule. The old skip treated the paper as out of scope because it measured bee tissues after syrup feeding rather than honey occurrence. On reading, it is in-scope a4 biomarker/toxicology and animal-feed transfer context with measured tissue metal values.

Numbers were checked against the Ukrainian abstract, methods, Table 1, Table 2, conclusion, and the English summary in the extracted PDF. The source reports Ag/Cu/Fe/Zn/Co in bee body tissues as mg/kg natural mass; it does not report honey metal concentrations. Products and ingredients are intentionally empty.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.