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Are Mobile Phones Wiping Out Bees?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Apr 15, 2007 07:03 AM
from the oh-i-hope-this-isn't-a-late-april-fools-joke dept.
from the oh-i-hope-this-isn't-a-late-april-fools-joke dept.
Mz6 wrote with a link to an article on The Independent site about a most unusual scientific theory. "Some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world — the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops."
Related Stories
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Vanishing Honeybees Will Affect Future Crops 322 comments
daninbusiness writes "Across the US, beekeepers are finding that their bees are disappearing — not returning while searching for nectar and pollen. This could have a major impact on the food industry in the United States, where as much as $14 billion worth of agriculture business depends on bees for crop pollination. Reasons for this problem, dubbed 'colony collapse disorder,' are still unknown. Theories include viruses, some type of fungus, poor bee nutrition, and pesticides."
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Cell Phones Aren't Killing Bees After All 253 comments
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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New Bee Attack recommended guidelines? (Score:5, Funny)
little tin hats (Score:5, Funny)
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Reasons to believe this is bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Europe has been using these frequencies far longer than in the US. Thus if there was any sort of "deployment pattern", it would start there.
3) Europe has higher cell use per capita and higher population density than the US. See (2)
4) Some of these frequencies have been heavily used in the past by high-channel UHF television stations with MUCH greater power (like 10,000 times). Ever wonder where channels above 70 went when cell phones started showing up? If it was something to do with these frequencies, all bees would have been gone back in the 70's.
and the most important one
5) these die-offs have been happening since people have been watching, long before there was any RF except for lightening
Maury
Parent
Re:Reasons to believe this is bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
There has been a general decline in beekeepers as cited in this news paper http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2007-02-15/news/bee-
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Re:Reasons to believe this is bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
And then add in this paragraph in the story in TFA:
"Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives."
This tells volumes to anyone with a hint of a clue about biology. It says that whatever is happening is natural, and has happened enough for Nature to have built in defenses against whatever it is. The only time in nature you leave food untouched is when your instincts tell you it is BAD. For that to happen takes evolution a longtime to perfect, thus this crap isn't new. It tells me it is something very nasty but very old, older than H. sapiens and certainly cell phones.
But cell phone scares are all the rage these days so...... Not saying cell phones don't pose some major risks, but that has nothing to do with a media bandwagon. They start for reasons totally unrelated to science and then in the chase for funding, marginal scientists hook up to the bandwagon and make it self sustaining.
Parent
Re:Reasons to believe this is bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
end it is more to do with the soon to occur Geomagnetic Reversal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal [wikipedia.org]
http://www.synchronizm.com/blog/index.php/2007/03
http://www.setiai.com/archives/000063.html [setiai.com]
Excerpt: (paragraph 10)
Perhaps the most enigmatic of the bee's senses is their ability to read the Earth's magnetic field. Magnetism is used by many animals, including dolphins and pigeons. The honeybee, however, is more sensitive than any other creature known.
This is a signpost of nature, if we watch we can learn...
Ex-MislTech
Parent
I can guess too (Score:5, Funny)
*Sunspots
*Global warming
*Terrorism
*CowboyNeal
Re:I can guess too (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
The bees aren't dying (Score:5, Informative)
"It's not new this year," Williams said. "If you know what I mean."
Many beekeepers are skeptical of the reports or at least how they're adding up. For 100 years, beekeepers have logged periodic reports of sudden and inexplicable bee die-offs. People refer the latest die-off by its initials "CCD," but one Georgia beekeeper instead calls it the "SSDD" crisis for "Same Stuff, Different Day."
There have been a few good theories as to why they're dying off in certain places:
"The (bee's) instinct is to go out and collect pollen and nectar, and that's what they do. When they can't get out of the hive, it puts them under stress. They need to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, but they won't go in their hive," said Ken Ograin, an Elmira beekeeper.
"People think that's not the best thing to feed them. There's a lot of argument about that," Scher said.
Parent
Netcraft confirms: The bees are dying (Score:5, Funny)
You don't need to be a Darwin to predict the bees' future. The hand writing is on the wall: The bees face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for bees because the bees are dying. Things are looking very bad for bees. As many of us are already aware, the bees continue to lose market share. Royal jelly flows like a river of nectar.
The honey bee is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core queens. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time honey bee celebrities Maya and Willy only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The honey bee is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Soul bee leader Q-Bee states that there are 7000 soul bees. How many bumblebees are there? Let's see. The number of soul bee versus bumblebee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 bumblebees. Stingless bee posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of bumblebee posts. Therefore there are about 700 stingless bees. A recent article put africanized bees at about 80 percent of the bee market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 africanized bees. This is consistent with the number of africanized bee Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Pitcairn Island, abysmal sales and so on, the africanized bees went out of business and were taken over by the hornets who sell another troubled species. Now the hornets are also dead, their corpses turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that bees have steadily declined in market share. The bees are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If bee are to survive at all it will be among insect dilettante dabblers. The bees continue to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save the bees from their fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the bees are dead.
Fact: The bees are dying.
Parent
Better Reasons Exist than Mobile 'Phones (Score:5, Informative)
I for one am extremely suspicious about claims that bees are being wiped out by mobile 'phones. Here's an example of why:
US = 301,505,000 people in 2,718,695 sq miles = 111 people per sq mile
UK = 60,609,153 people in 94,526 sq miles = 641 people per sq mile
So, why is it that the US is suffering this major disappearance of bees when the UK isn't? Seeing as the density of mobile phone signals is going to be FAR higher in the UK? Ok, i accept that mobile phones in the UK work on different frequencies, but from what I've heard, the same thing is happening in Poland and Spain [earthfiles.com], which both have far lower population densities than the UK, and the same mobile phone frequencies. Of course, Poland and Spain import far more US Genetically Modified crops than the UK does.
Re:Better Reasons Exist than Mobile 'Phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the strong bees will survive, and repollinate the earth.
Parent
Re:Better Reasons Exist than Mobile 'Phones (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Better Reasons Exist than Mobile 'Phones (Score:5, Insightful)
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What study? (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like the sort of work he might do, but a one-sentence paraphrasal is scant information on which to base any comment.
Invader Zim (Score:5, Funny)
THE BEEEES
Yet more ignorance to confuse the public (Score:5, Informative)
Medical misrepresentation in the media has a long history -- in the 18th century, when a British physician developed a smallpox vaccine based on cowpox, newspapers at the time described people turning into cows, causing a national panic. Mistrust of vaccines lingered for decades afterwards. In 1999, anti-vaccine hysteria again surfaced when an extremely poorly designed study managed to be published in Lancet, claiming that 80% of children with autism had received the MMR vaccine. (80% of British children received vaccinations in the first place.) Lancet retracted the article, and years of wasteful research went into re-examining the vaccine theory -- plenty of other locations had rising incidences of autism despite reductions in vaccination rates. There is no controversy among epidemiologists today, but the media continues to describe this as a "controversial theory".
The incidence of autism has since leveled off, suggesting that the observed increase was just based on changes in diagnostic criteria and public awareness; the true prevalence has likely never changed.
The bee disorder in question is probably caused by viruses such as black queen cell virus or bee paralysis virus. Also, South African apiaries have had a problem with transposons (jumping genes), possibly viral in origin, that cause drone workers to produce children, disrupting the hive. Despite what you may have learned in high school, honeybees are a domesticated species with an unnatural pattern of reproduction in the first place. Wild bees do not always have strict hierarchies.
Biggest Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes it sound like a new disease to me.
Corn fields? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the die-offs have been near corn fields, and a pesticide that coats some of the GM corn is a neurotoxin that causes disorientation in bees, even at low doses. There was a similar issue in France a number of years ago, apparently. Honey production was cut in half for several years. The Star-Ledger here in NJ ran an article about it today. Some are speculating that this might be a factor.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news -11/1176611470205100.xml&coll=1 [nj.com]
Not quite (Score:5, Funny)
This happened in 1996 (Score:5, Interesting)
The cell phone theory is a little weak. From TFA, researchers found that "bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby"?? How nearby? Inside the homes of honeybee keepers? If that were the case we'd have seen the issue spring up much sooner.
Anyway, bee population scares have come up before. From this article [newsbank.com]:
So how did the bees make a recovery 11 years ago? Had they even recovered before this current problem? Can anyone find a bee population trend from the past 50 years?
Another thought: could this have anything to do with the fear of Africanized honeybees spreading into North America? Sorry for spouting conspiracy theory, but what if the government tried to use GM to stop the killer bees and it backfired? (same level of plausibility as the cell phone theory).
Radio waves are not the problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
-
They are however, several miles away from other bees making the transmission of disease and parasites less likely.
- Both corn and soybeans are planted directly adjacent to them. So current pesticides and herbicides are not affecting them.
- Productivity of honey is down considerably from a decade ago when I had 13 hives in a different location. However those hives were much closer to other bees and I am sure got the parasites that killed so many bees in the last decade. All 13 of those hives died.
- Honey production is down primarily because no one is planting clover for hay anymore. It is all corn and soybeans. It is a struggle I'm sure for the bees to find enough to store away for the winter.
- Commercial bees are transported from site to site for pollination. That is stressful to the hive and subjects them too other bees that are possibly infected with whatever.
I just don't accept the theory that it is radio waves. The study sample is probably so small it means nothing anyway.Man, I'm way too late (Score:5, Informative)
My grandfather was a semi-hobbiest beekeeper who made a decent living after retirement selling beekeeping equipment, and taught me all about the wonder of the bees. I don't claim to be the worlds leading authority on bees, but I find them pretty fascinating, and know a bunch about 'em.
Anyways, I don't see Occam's razor being applied here. Here is what devastates bees:
1) Foulbrood.. Comes in two varieties, American and European.. Makes the larva basically rot in their pupas. It can be prevented with teramiacin (sp?! its a horse medicine), but the only cure for an infected colony is fire, and lots of it - mandated by the authorities. It's been somewhat of an epidemic since the 80s. There is lots of talk about it spreading because of commercially sold queens, and or colonies. Ie; The industry developed a bee that makes lots of honey, but is succeptible to this. This accounts for a *lot* of missing bees.
2) Africanized bees? A lot gets made of "killer bees", but once they move into a colony, that colony doesn't collect as much honey - and you don't see as many bees.
3) Climate or other environmental problems. Bees will abandon a location if it isn't suitable. It's common to have a swarm (too little food or too much space, so half the bees pack up a new queen and leave) that leaves the original colony to die - too few bees left to tend to the queen, or an incapable queen is a death sentence to a hive.
I can't believe the "scientists" would skip past an obvious sign of climate change and jump straight to cell phones. I've never heard this before, and frankly, it sounds like a bunch of horse-shit.
So long and thanks for all the pollen! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:its not just bees ... (Score:5, Funny)
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