Cell Phones Aren't Killing Bees After All

radioweather writes "A couple of weeks ago, there was a nutty idea discussed in The Independent that claimed the electromagnetic radiation from cell phones was causing bees to become disoriented, preventing them from returning to the hive. The flimsy cell phone argument was used to explain Colony Collapse Disorder. Today the LA Times reports that researchers at UC San Francisco have uncovered what they believe to be the real culprit: a parasitic fungus. Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country."

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[witte (681163)]

It certainly seems a more plausible cause.

Swing that razor one more time.

[pragma_x (644215)]

I'm not supporting the "mobile phone" argument one bit, but I'm still skeptical of this as the reason. The fungus plays a role, as it really is the simplest explaination for CCD; it's just the smoking gun. You need to slice with the razor one more time.

Ask yourself: why is this fungus so successful at killing domestic honeybees, why now, and how is it moving from hive to hive so well?

I think the answer comes down to one of a few possibilities:
* The honeybees are stressed (diet, environment, travel, etc) and can't fight the infection
* The plants the bees pollenate are favoring growth of this fungus like never before (GMO's, pesticides, fertilizers, etc)
* Hives are being kept in containers/conditions that favor fungus growth
* The fungus is an invasive species and hence, the bees have no/little natural defense against it

The first one, unfortunately, seems most likely to me. We can *hope* that it's one or more of the others, since they're much more fixable IMO; they pretty much come down to "doing things they way grandpa did" and see if things change.

Re:Swing that razor one more time.

[flyingsquid (813711)]

There could be a number of factors that are contributing, and the recent New York Times article manages to hit on several of them in the space of a paragraph:

Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees' natural forage areas.

So we have a number of possible factors implicated here: (1) the bees aren't properly nourished, which will make them more vulnerable to infection, (2) lots of hives are being crammed into tight quarters, which makes it easy for disease to spread from hive to hive, (3) bees are being moved from place to place, so the infection is being spread all across the country, rather than being localized.

It actually seems remarkably similar to the kinds of issues that are thought to have led to the emergence of epidemic diseases among humans after the rise of civilization: you started cramming lots of people together into cities so transmission was easier, lots of them were poor and malnourished, so they were easier to infect, and then they were able to travel very long distances (boats, horses, roads, etc.)and spread the infection much faster.

Why blame everything else?

[guruevi (827432)]

I see more and more in common media that everybody tries to blame everything on new technology going from cancer to depression, blamed on cell phones to video games. Yet, they don't bother looking or trying to understand the deeper reasons like our old friends in the mushroom... euhm, fungi world.

Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe? (Like the sun and moon worshipers, or offerers of livestock and enemies, witchhunting?)

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[blincoln (592401)]

Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe?

I think it's human nature - when something bad happens, most people's first assumption is that it's related to something that changed recently. This is usually at least a good place to start, although obviously jumping to conclusions based on it is the wrong thing to do.

In this case, the cell phone argument at first seemed hokey to me, but then I thought of a way that it might not be completely ridiculous. Maybe some people with more than an amateu

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[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

Eh. Phones are such a good target. I mean, you set your phone on your desk, and you get speaker feedback every time it does discovery on a tower, and you think how often that happens when the damn thing is in your pants, and so it seems plausible whenever some group freaks out about this or that thing and blames it on cellphones, until it turns out that they have no fricking evidence, but by that point the idea of dangerous cellphones is even more firmly ingrained in peoples minds, thus making them more lik

Don't think too hard ...

[ackthpt (218170)]

I see more and more in common media that everybody tries to blame everything on new technology going from cancer to depression, blamed on cell phones to video games. Yet, they don't bother looking or trying to understand the deeper reasons like our old friends in the mushroom... euhm, fungi world. Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe? (Like the sun and moon worshipers, or offerers of livestock and enemies, witchhunting?)

Did it occur to you that human stupidity has a lot to answer

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[prelelat (201821)]

I agree, fungi parasites and disease have caused coloney collapse before. I do agree that they should have gone through all the claims such as cell phone usage to make sure they figured it out. I never believed that was the reason(this has happend in other years with less deaths) and I'm glad they found out what it was(I got the impression be farmers who have experianced this before figured it would be something like this). The media jumped on board with the cell phone usage and I think I read a couple a

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[shaitand (626655)]

'I see more and more in common media that everybody tries to blame everything on new technology'

That is fairly reasonable since this is a new problem it stands to reason that something new would be the cause. Most of the other things blamed on technology are old problems.

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[drinkypoo (153816)]

That is fairly reasonable since this is a new problem it stands to reason that something new would be the cause.

There are extremely numerous examples of old behavior whose results have finally stacked up sufficiently to cause a problem. Global warming is one of them. The destruction of the Southern coastline of the US, the destruction of the flora that causes drainage to work properly, and related issues made it possible for hurricane katrina to wipe new orleans mostly off the map. Mercury mining in Lake

Re:Why blame everything else?

[CODiNE (27417)]

I don't think religion has anything to do with it. More likely it's confusion on the whole cause vs correlation thing. Hey even scientists sometimes confuse the two.

News: Bees are dying in great numbers!
Reaction: What's changed recently? Ahah! Global warming! Cell phones! VoIP! AppleTV!

It's really natural to think "What's different?" when something bad happens for the first time in memory. Even if the whole world was atheist I can't imagine things would be much different. Unless you assume everyone would automatically have an I.Q. of 150. Not all atheists are intelligent after all. ;-)

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[hey! (33014)]

Well, to some degree being suspicious of novelty is a human trait.

But the real story here is how poorly the media are equipped to deal with science or technology stories. They don't have enough scientifically literate reporters. They apparently can't find any reporters who are even interested in science or technology.

Anybody who takes Science News, which every journalist should has been aware of the bee fungus story for years now. Stories about cell phone radiation have been around for decades.

But someho

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[natophonic (103088)]

It's been many years since my dad and I kept a few beehives in the backyard for fun, but foulbrood == fungus didn't ring true with what I'd remembered... and it's not true [wikipedia.org], foulbrood == baterica.

Re:Why blame everything else?

[Red Flayer (890720)]

It's called foulbrood. It's what kills beehives. Any apiculturist (beekeeper) can tell you all about it.

And any beekeeper worth his salt would tell you that foulbrood is bacterial, not fungal, and is treated with tetracycline antibiotics -- Terramycin is what I used when I kept bees.

In addition, foulbrood exists in almost every hive -- it's hives that are weakened for other reasons that are really damaged by it. So, for example, a hive that did not have adequate food supplies (such as if bees didn't return to the hive with pollen) would be more likely to have a huge foulbrood problem.

It's this knee-jerk environmentalism. Everyone was quick to blame cell phones, or some other junk science bullshit, for a problem that didn't exist.

Yes, there was a lot of speculation that was evenutally found to be false. That's science for ya.

/Never mind the fact that several bee parasites are ravaging North American hives due to successive mild winters, which may or may not be due to anthropogenic environmental problems.

Re:Why blame everything else?

[slamb (119285)]

[Noticing wifi without electronic equipment] is a well known phenomenon. While quite rare, it exists and some people really cannot stand it.

I don't believe you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show me the results of your double-blind trial. If you personally know "a number of people" who can do this, it should be quite easy to perform. After performing it, you reasonably claim that you have evidence. After getting your study published in a peer-reviewed journal and your results reproduced elsewhere, you can reasonably claim that it is well-known. Until then, stop saying crazy things.

I blame the bees...

[BenSchuarmer (922752)]

they shouldn't use cell phones while flying.

Let me be the first to say

[davidwr (791652)]

"I think there is a fungus among us."

Everyone repeat after me:

[R2.0 (532027)]

"Correlation does not necessarily equate to causality"

Repeat 100x.

Apply to all the other dumbass pop-sci suburban "crises". Cell phones cause brain cancer. MMR vaccine and autism. Etc.

That is correct

[Cracked Pottery (947450)]

Correlation does not prove causality, it doesn't disprove it either. Enough anecdotal evidence can justify reasonable suspicion. E.g. brain cancer on the side of the head of people who heavily use cell phones, or children who become autistic within weeks of a vaccination. I don't think anybody with any sense believed the cell phone - bee dying association, since cell phones represent only a small slice of the EMR that is ubiquitous.

Re:Everyone repeat after me:

[Itninja (937614)]

Oh, I'm pretty sure it does. Everybody knows that umbrellas make it rain. It's just common sense. But I guess you elite Harvard liberals wouldn't know much about that. /end sarcasm

Concider this

[Handbrewer (817519)]

Its always easier to blame it on something that people don't really understand and/or already fear. Remember the fear of brain tumors from cell phones? Now when a Journalist or whatever hears bees cant find their way home, they obviously feel compelled to link it to the fearsome x-rays (I call them x-rays in the sense that x is unknown and scary rays of course). Surely, such "news" - "sell" more than some boring research into fungi. Nobody, cares about fungus. They care about scary invisible rays.

Bees be bedeviled beyond belushi

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

http://caughtinthexfire.mu.nu/archives/snl_bee.jpg [caughtinthexfire.mu.nu]
What a waste of a talent. Thanks, dope!

There IS a fungus among us?

[Wandering Wombat (531833)]

I thought my mom was just being goofy....

Fungi

[uab21 (951482)]

...can do weird things - The Jungle episode of Planet Earth the other week showed fungi infecting insects, *making them seek higher ground*, and then growing out of their dead bodies to spore anew. The behavior controlling bit was the freakiest to me - might explain the mass evacuations if it is something similar to that. I also seem to recall something a while back on /. linking to a study showing parasites 'remote controlling' host insects...

Re:Fungi

[jdunn14 (455930)]

If you find this stuff interesting, check out a book called Parasite Rex. It has all the gory details of these and a bunch of other parasites. For example, there's a fluke that lives in a snail, but needs to enter a bird to complete it's life cycle. It actually pushes the snail's eyestalk out and waves around to get the attention of predators.

Damn bees

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Stop making phone calls all the time, bees! I see people driving around in cars with those stupid things stuck to their faces all the time. It's a wonder they can concentrate enough to find their way back home. You, being insects, have small brains and could never carry on a simultaneous phone call conversation without losing track of what you're doing and losing the hive. I mean, it's no wonder cellphones are giving bees so much trouble. Turn off the phones, bees, fly back to your hives, puke up our honey, and fly out with new instructions. Stop being lazy and using cellphones.

You know those phones are sold with that fungus on them, bees.

More proof of global warming

[lessthan0 (176618)]

Of course, it is global warming. Both directly and indirectly making the bad fungus thrive this far north of the equator. All problems are related to global warming. No need to study anything anymore.

while not proof, it may be evidence

[WindBourne (631190)]

1. It does come from the equator area and did not thrive in the cold (until recently).
2. Or it could be that W's terrorist put it here and we have tenet and the democrats to blame for it all.
3. Or it could be that it was carried over by China's rockets flying overhead, destroying a fake weather sat. and the parts rained down on us, where actually coated in it.

Or who knows. It is possible that it simple mutated and it could be that it is simply being spread by mankind's transports.
Occams solves this.

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[Abcd1234 (188840)]

And what if it is? The Pine Beetle is destroying arboreal forests specifically because warmer winters allow them to thrive.

While blaming everything on global warming is stupid, taking the opposite position that global warming is harmless is equally, if not more stupid.

Nosema fits the CCD profile.

[xC0000005 (715810)]

Now we've been dealing with normal nosema for a while. Nosema weakens bees. Imagine if a dozen roaches crawled into your lungs and lived there, multiplying. You'd have trouble breathing, and so do the bees. Nosema leaves the bees barely able to crawl in some cases, so here's how CCD could play out:

Bees get Nosema in the fall. It weakens them greatly. In the spring as the hive turns the corner to build up, the foragers start taking cleansing flights (hell, the house bees do it too. Anything alive long enought o harden the wings probably takes a flight or two). Nosema leaves them weak, so they fall to the ground on their flight and die of exposure. House bees are held in their position by the presence of foragers but the hive's trying to build up. Soon house bees are pressed into foraging. These are infected too. Now the nurse bees are left. The ones older than five days take a few orienting flights and go at it. Nosema's a pain, so they die. What do you have left? Basically the CCD profile - a queen, the capped brood and a few dozen nurse bees in her retinue.

You want to know how cell phones kill bees? When you set the phone down on top of one.

Global Swarming

[rodney dill (631059)]

Does this mean Al Gore won't be able to plug Global Swarming as a problem?

A simple solution - make them stronger by...

[csoto (220540)]

...mating them with heartier wild bees from... AFRICA! Yeah! That'll do it!

Actually,

[EinZweiDrei (955497)]

...there's just a massive apiary chondroitin deficiency -- it's the bee's knees.

Duh.

[mosb1000 (710161)]

Who would have guessed it was a disease and not cell phones? I was so sure, I already threw mine away.

Change the headline

[shaitand (626655)]

There isn't one word in that article for or against cellular signals disrupting bee navigation systems.

The article is about one common factor that has been found in many of the hives. The researchers stress that this is only a small sample of the hives and that they don't think this fungus alone could cause the problem.

Its also depressing because if the fungus is central to the problem there MIGHT be an untested chemical that COULD have some detrimental affect on the fungus... MAYBE.

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[Alomex (148003)]

Seems to me like a lot of the geeks here don't want to admit that there might be unintended consequences of saturating the environment with RF, and are jumping to conclusions about Nosema being the cause.

By the same token, too many enviromentalists are far too quick to attribute ill effects to cell phones without any evidence to backup their opinion. My guess is that because cell phone users can be quite obnoxious it befits their sense of justice if the could cause cancer or kill bees.

Re:Can't be right

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

It probably is technologies fault, in that the fungus is likely one that has been brought into an area filled with vulnerable bees from another area...Just another invasive species. Also, we've been encouraging a bit of a bee monoculture, and trucking hives all over the country, spreading the fungus.

Just a hazard of the modern world. Hopefully now that we've isolated the problem, we can go ahead and solve it with the application of still more technology! (Thereby creating strains of fungus resistant to whatever it was that we used to kill the fungus, yadda yadda yadda).

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[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

Yea, that's me, luddite to the core, nevermind my tech job, and my tech degree, and the basic pro-techness of almost every aspect of my life.

Technology causes problems; it's foolish to think otherwise. It also solves problems, which should evident to anyone who isn't hopelessly biased. Bit of a rat race, unfortunately. But fortunately our techno-rat is still in the lead, and hopefully he'll stay that way for a long time to come.

Re:Cellphone don't kill bees...

[je ne sais quoi (987177)]

Honestly, until the other explanations started coming out I lost a LOT of faith in scientists and researchers. I mean, come on.

Sorry to get on your case here, but this shit pisses me off. Some guy went and said something and some twit of a reporter who couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground reported it as being fact and now all scientists and researchers have lost your faith? Look man, it seems to me that you need to grow some common sense and the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Science is not the borg where once one scientist says something, all must agree and that this is now fact and written up in some book in an ivory tower somewhere. Science is done by real humans, some of whom are better than others but all of whom make mistakes from time to time. The reason why you can sometimes trust scientists over, say corporations, priests, or politicians is that 1) scientists have less motivations to lie (notice I didn't say no motivation), and 2) if they're good scientists, their assertions are testable hypotheses. That means that other scientists,who are real humans and have independent thoughts so may or may not agree with the 1st scientist, can do the same work and see if they come to the same conclusion. So stop believing everything you hear about some dimwit reporter reporting that one loony made an unfounded assertion and now "science" or "scientists" now all agreee on something.

P.S. Incidentally, this is why Exxon and the republicans can manipulate the debate on global climate change so easily, they prop up one loony with demonstratably false data or assertions and now global climate change is "in debate" when the reality is that the population, nor the reporters disseminating the falsity can be bothered to distinguish between good scientific work and bad.

Re:Cellphone don't kill bees...

[allanc (25681)]

The guy didn't even say that cell phones caused it. The study in question was about cordless phone base stations. And the base station basically had to be right on top of the colony to have an effect. Reporter reported cordless as "mobile phones", that turned into "cell phones"

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[Thrip (994947)]

P.S. Incidentally, this is why Exxon and the republicans can manipulate the debate on global climate change so easily, they prop up one loony with demonstratably false data or assertions and now global climate change is "in debate" when the reality is that the population, nor the reporters disseminating the falsity can be bothered to distinguish between good scientific work and bad.

I generally agree with your post, but you make it sound like figuring out who to believe when scientific issues are debated is a simple matter. It's not. I like to think I'm a bit smarter and better informed than the average dude, but honestly I don't have the time to wade through dozens or hundreds of climate studies to figure out whose science is "good" or "bad," especially when zillions of dollars are being spent to propogandize me in either direction. Like most people, I'm left to try to judge based on

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[DDLKermit007 (911046)]

I'm about as big of a "down with the man" as you can be, but Global Warming has it's pitfalls. Do I admit Global Warming is happening? Yup, just like I admit back in the 70's we were going through Global Cooling. Are we having an affect on the matter? Sure! Are we affecting things as much as most are saying? I'm betting no. The planet goes through warming & cooling phases regardless of what we do. In large part this gloom & doom of Global Warming started with the psychotics over at Greenpeace, and s

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[orangesquid (79734)]

I don't see how anyone with a good understanding of the Scientific Process could possibly misunderstand this article, you know? It is clearly stating that we have proved that the reason people talk on cell phones so much is that their minds have been infected with a parasitic fungus, and we shouldn't be worried about accidentally swallowing bees from flopping our mouths open whilst we walk-and-talk.

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[LurkerXXX (667952)]

Mites and fungi have been the prime suspects in this for well over a year now. One group in the past couple weeks who hypothesized it was cell phones, you read an article on that story since it was sensationalized, and that's all you've ever bothered to look at in the topic. So basically you are totally ignorant of what the status and consensus of research in the field is, and so you lost faith in scientists and researchers based on a hyped article by 1 group in the news. I think this says a lot more ab

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[AbsoluteXyro (1048620)]

A. Flies do not "happily" buzz around inside running microwaves. Not for long anyways.

B. Do not lump "vegans" in with "deluded hippies." It is not our fault PETA paid some assclown to burn down animal testing facilities and spray paint VEGAN POWER on the ashes. The majority of vegans are not stupid protest mongering hippies.

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[LGagnon (762015)]

This is modded Insightful? How about Troll? Honestly, you complain about people blaming the wrong source on the one hand and blame "vegan hippies" on the other with no proof that vegans are responsible for the claims.

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[PTBarnum (233319)]

3 GHz = 10 cm wavelength. Where I live, most of the flies are significantly shorter than 10 cm. If things are different where you live, remind me to stay away.

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[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

Sounds to me like they took a bunch of inconclusive findings, then made a sensationalist rebuttal to the cell phone argument to prevent problems in the market.

But the results are "highly preliminary" and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. "We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved."

N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it

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[alisson (1040324)]

But using some basic reasoning skills, what seems more likely:

1) A parasite, known to kill bees, and found widely in bee-hives, is killing bees, contributing to their declined population.
or
2) Despite a complete lack of evidence, despite the sudden decrease in population, despite years of low populations having happened before the introduction of cell phones; cell phones did it.

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[AoT (107216)]

There is one thing pretty much all GMO has in common and that is the terminator gene. They are all made to not reproduce, thus it is completely reasonable that they could have an effect on an animal that is part of their sexual cycle.