Slashdot Mirror
Are Mobile Phones Wiping Out Bees?
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."
Perhaps its something to do with newer 3G technology on US and continental headsets?
Or maybe the government is using some sort of exotic systems to conduct mapping, drug interdiction or surveillance? Millimeter-wave radar can produce pictures of buildings, and operates on a frequency similar to cell phones.
In a few areas in the western US, there have been incidents when military aircraft electronic warfare systems have triggered widespread issues like garage doors opening and closing by themselves and TV signals being jammed.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yeah, but...
There are only two frequency bands for cellular technology: analog & digital
Starting in February, 2008 the cellular industry is dropping analog in all but the smaller rural communities, if even that.
So by next year they'll all come back, right?
Pesticides? One beekeper thinks it's genetic engineering of agricultural plants. I tend to agree. I say, let's just put the beaker and lazer tweezers away already. Let insects do what they do best - suckling off mother nature's teat, not father human's trampling feet.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
But UK bees are going missing too, just not in such large numbers yet, and the Government Bee Inspectors of the National Bee Unit are denying there is anything wrong. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/sto ry/0,,2055067,00.html
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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
1) US and European phone systems operate on different frequencies
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
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:
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).
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
He could have a point and GM plants that allow heavy use of herbicides are also a problem for wild insects. The sonner we learn how to turn dirt directly into food the better.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
-
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.What's called "millimeter" waves have a wavelength around one millimeter. Most cell phones operate around 300 millimeter wavelength, with the 2.45 GHz band used for some phones and other wireless equipment being around 120 millimeters. Not similar at all.
military aircraft electronic warfare systems have triggered widespread issues like garage doors opening and closing by themselves and TV signals being jammed
Again, not even close to millimeter waves. Garage openers work at 49 MHz, around 6000 millimeters, TV broadcasts range from 54 MHz in channel 2 up to around 800 MHz, which means it more or less uses the frequencies between garage openers and cell phones.
I could believe that millimeter waves, if strong enough, could kill bees. But lower frequencies, i.e. longer wavelengths, are very unlikely to affect bees. For the same reason as ants survive in a microwave oven, the wavelengths are much bigger than the insects bodies.
I would say the most probable reason for the disappearing bees is some epidemy. Viruses and bacteria can spread rapidly through a population, which would account for the problem apparently having started in the USA and now spreading also through Europe. If it were a technological cause, the problem would be restricted by area, appearing more or less at the same time where that technology is used.
My German is not what it was. But if this is the right article, then it wasn't mobile phones, it was DECT base stations. And, either way, I'm not very convinced. It seems to me that they didn't control for the smell of these things.
That may not seem important, but smell is important to bees and if a dog can be trained to sniff out a cellphone (which the UK prison service claim to have done), a DECT base-station is probably detectable by a bee. If any of that smell mimics or masks the signals bees would normally pick up, it might change their behaviour. Besides, changes in magnetic fields supposedly confuse bees, and maybe these base-stations have transformers in them.
I'd be grateful for any further (or better) information on this. As a UK beekeeper, I've been fielding calls about this all day (and about sunspots, GM crops and ley lines. The more I talk to people, the more I think the creationists have a point), and I've not been coping very well. Personally, I reckon it's probably a virus carried about by the varroa mite, which is now fairly resistant to most of the treatments used, but I'm used to being wrong.
I call Bullocks on the truck theory. My uncle, as well as numerous local farmers have bee hives that have stayed in the same place for a decade or several decades. The bees have all died off in the last couple years. Something is going on, and it's not trucking.
Lazer tweezers? Gee golly, that sounds COOL! Why don't we have THOSE in our labs?
r der
Back on topic. I'm suspicious of any comments regarding GMO's. Bt cotton toxin's effects are supposed to be specific to lepidoptera LARVAE. Honeybees are of the order hymenoptera, and it's supposed to be the adult bees that disappear from the colonies. Furthermore, prior to collapse, the bees that appear to make up the workforce are young adult bees. If the larvae are getting wiped out, this fact doesn't make sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Diso
Then again, it could be something as simple as the gene insertion into the genome of Bt plants have caused some undesirable protein product, but this should be isolated to certain or even just a single Bt plant species. This is because Bt gene insertion into genomes is completely random, at least to my knowledge. Because of the randomness, I think something definitely weird can happen, but the chances of the insertion landing in "junk" DNA instead of coding DNA, well, it's pretty high. Granted, "junk" DNA isn't always junk...
I say test it out. Get a multiple hives in multiple greenhouses, each with it's own GMO crop, along with other non GMO crops for controls, and see what happens. This shouldn't be too hard to do since you can control flowering time or what not. I think the only real issue is getting the bees. If the bees start dying, then the Europeans and the SF Gate's suggestion may prove to be valid.
FWIW, I believe that the only bees affected are the hive bees. These ARE the source of honey, and they are the kind that can be carted around from place to place. They are also a minority of all bees. If pesticides aren't used indiscriminately, then native bees can do much of the work of pollination. But, of course, this won't happen if you kill them off whenever your plants aren't in flower.
If hive bees vanish, then successful farming will REQUIRE that less insecticide be used...or at least that it be of a very targeted variety.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Blaming it on cellphones is a bit of a stretch though. There seem to be far more likely causes:
Pesticides/herbicides/fertilisers, particularly modern hormonal ones, could be disrupting the hives.
Cross breeding of bees (eg. Africanised killer bees) could disrupt bee/hive behaviour.
Monoculture farming cuts down of plant food diversity, leading to a less balanced diet. GM crops alter the composition of pollen & nectar.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Why would this start in the US and then go to Europe? Europe is far denser in population than the typical rural US where farming is comon. With the higher density there will of course be more cell phones. Seems odd to me.