Kovalchuk et al. 2019 - honey-bee tissue metals after silver and copper citrate feeding
Kovalchuk and colleagues fed honey-bee families sugar syrup containing silver citrate or copper citrate and measured Fe, Cu, Zn, Co, Cr, Pb, and Cd in head, thorax, and abdomen tissues. This is in-scope a4 animal biomonitoring and toxicology context for metal-containing bee feed exposures, not honey or bee-product occurrence.
Key numbers
The study formed five groups of bee families, with three bee families in each group. The control group received sugar syrup at 1:1 concentration, 1000 mL/group/week. Experimental group II received silver citrate at 0.5 mg/L of sugar syrup; group III received silver citrate at 1.0 mg/L; group IV received copper citrate at 0.5 mg/L; and group V received copper citrate at 1.0 mg/L. The monitoring period lasted 28 days.
On day 28, the authors extracted 100 worker bees from each group, dissected head, thorax, and abdominal sections, and formed three parallel 1 g homogenate samples from each section. Fe, Cu, Zn, Co, Cr, Pb, and Cd were reported in mg/kg of natural mass in Figures 1-7.
The extracted text preserves the figure captions and units but not the bar heights from Figures 1-7. Source-printed numeric and statistical statements include:
| Finding | Source-printed value |
|---|---|
| Fe in head tissue, group III vs control | 24.2% higher, p < 0.05 |
| Fe in thorax tissue, groups IV and V vs control | 1.2 and 1.1 times higher, p < 0.05 |
| Zn in head tissue, groups II and III vs control | 15% higher (p < 0.05) and 16% higher (p < 0.01) |
| Zn in head tissue, groups IV and V vs control | 24% lower and 19% lower, both p < 0.01 |
| Zn in thorax tissue, groups IV and V vs control | 7% and 19% lower, p < 0.01 |
| Pb in head tissue, groups IV and V vs control | 1.7 and 1.6 times lower, p < 0.05 |
| Abdomen Pb and Cd, groups IV and V vs control | Pb lower at p < 0.001 and Cd lower at p < 0.05 |
The abstract states that silver citrate at 0.5 and 1.0 mg/L increased Fe in head and abdominal tissues, decreased Fe in thorax, decreased Cu in head, thorax, and abdomen, increased Zn in head and thorax, decreased Zn in abdomen, and reduced Pb and Cd in all anatomic sections. The abstract states that copper citrate at 0.5 and 1.0 mg/L reduced Fe in head tissue, increased Fe in thorax and abdomen, increased Cu, and reduced Zn, Pb, and Cd in all anatomic sections.
The conclusion states that silver citrate at 0.5 and 1.0 mg/L increased Fe and Zn in head tissues and decreased Pb in abdomen tissues, while copper citrate at 0.5 and 1.0 mg/L increased Fe in thorax and abdomen, increased Cu, and decreased Zn, Pb, and Cd in head, thorax, and abdomen tissues. The authors report no significant differences in Co, except an increase in the abdomen of group V, and no significant differences in Cr.
Methods (brief)
Honey bees of the Carpathian breed were kept in eight-frame beehives at the apiary of S. Z. Gzhytskyi Lviv National University of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnologies. Silver and copper were added to sugar syrup as citrates obtained by a nanotechnology method. Tissues were dry-ashed in porcelain crucibles at 100 degrees C initially and 400-450 degrees C at the final ashing stage for 10-12 h, dissolved in 10 mL of 6 N HCl, filtered, and analyzed for Fe, Cu, Zn, Co, Cr, Pb, and Cd by atomic-absorption spectrophotometer SF-115PK. Statistics used ANOVA and Statistica 6.0 with significance at p < 0.05.
Implications
Certification: Do not use these values as honey, propolis, wax, pollen, or bee-product occurrence data. They are bee-tissue biomarker values after experimental silver/copper citrate feeding.
Courses: Useful companion to bee-treatment and pollinator-health material because it shows tissue-specific shifts in essential and toxic metals after metal citrate additions to syrup.
App: Context only. The source can support honey-supply-chain questions about apicultural treatments and bee biomarkers but does not support product scoring.
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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 sugar-syrup metal citrate exposure rather than honey occurrence. On reading, it is in-scope a4 animal biomonitoring and toxicology evidence.
Values were checked against the abstract, methods, results prose, figure captions, discussion, and conclusion in the extracted PDF. The source’s quantitative concentration plots are graph-only in the extracted text, so this page does not guess bar heights or tissue concentrations. Products and ingredients are intentionally empty. bee-body-tissue and biological-tissue are descriptive matrices for the measured tissue homogenates.
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.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 80b4735 | 2026-06-11 | recover-ingest 2026-06-11: kovalchuk2019-honey-bee-citrate-tissue-metals (lane a4, was skip:not-food-occurrence) |