Beekeepers and their honeybees can be invaluable participants in environmental surveys, according to a study published May 20, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jennifer Shelton of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and colleagues.
Honeybees can be extremely useful collectors of environmental data, since they gather plant materials from a wide area and amass it in a convenient central location. However, traditional methods of collecting these data are costly and time-consuming and have only been successful at relatively small scales.
In this study, Shelton and colleagues present the results of the UK National Honey Monitoring Scheme (NHMS), which enlisted the volunteer assistance of over 3,500 beekeepers across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland between 2018 and 2025. These citizen scientists submitted 5,789 samples of honey from their hives, and researchers extracted DNA from pollen grains within the honey to identify which plants the bees were visiting. These analyses identified over 800 species of plants utilized by honeybees and pinpointed the most commonly visited species, including cultivated canola, clovers, and invasive Himalayan balsam.
This study serves as a proof-of-concept of the effectiveness of honeybees for gathering environmental data, and as a model of how to establish and maintain an engaged community of citizen scientists. Beekeepers were involved in the project design, kept up to date through newsletters, and provided with the DNA results from their honey samples.
The current NHMS data includes biases both geographically, with most samples coming from the South of England, and temporally, with most samples being collected in early or late summer. But as the archive grows, these data could be used to track pollinator activity, the spread of invasive plants, or the environmental impacts of pollutants and diseases.
The authors add: “Monitoring environmental change has always been hard at national scales, with the sheer size of nations making the resources to do this of huge costs. Working with beekeepers across the UK, we show the potential of the National Honey Monitoring Scheme and its use of environmental DNA approaches to monitor changes in the wild plants, as well as its role as a resource for understanding new risks from pesticides, and disease risks that these critical pollinators are exposed to.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One : https://plos.io/4dblW61
Citation: Shelton JMG, Woodcock BA, Newbold L, Oliver A, Savage J, Grove E, et al. (2026) Using honeybees for national scale long-term eDNA biomonitoring. PLoS One 21(5): e0347485. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347485
Author countries: UK
Funding: This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) joint research programs NE/N018125/1 LTS-M ASSIST—Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems ( www.assist.ceh.ac.uk ) and NE/W005050/1 AgZero+: Towards sustainable, climate-neutral farming.
PLOS One
Observational study
Animals
Using honeybees for national scale long-term eDNA biomonitoring
20-May-2026
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.