There is a growing need to understand relationships between agricultural intensification and global change. Monitoring solutions, however, often do not include pollinator communities that are of importance to ecosystem integrity. Here, we put forth the honey bee as an economical and broadly available bioindicator that can be used to assess and track changes in the quality of agricultural ecosystems. We detail a variety of simple, low-cost procedures that can be deployed within honey bee hives to gain generalizable information about ecosystem quality at multiple scales, and discuss the potential of the honey bee system in both environmental and ecological bioindication.

越来越需要了解农业集约化与全球变化之间的关系。但是，监测解决方案通常不包括对生态系统完整性至关重要的授粉媒介社区。在这里，我们提出了蜜蜂作为一种经济且广泛使用的生物指示剂，可用于评估和跟踪农业生态系统质量的变化。我们详细介绍了可在蜜蜂蜂巢内部署的各种简单，低成本程序，以获取有关多个规模的生态系统质量的通用信息，并讨论了蜜蜂系统在环境和生态生物指示方面的潜力。