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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."
It certainly seems a more plausible cause.
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?)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
they shouldn't use cell phones while flying.
"I think there is a fungus among us."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
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).
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
Does this mean Al Gore won't be able to plug Global Swarming as a problem?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
...mating them with heartier wild bees from... AFRICA! Yeah! That'll do it!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
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.
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.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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 for? Individually we are quite clever animals, but we're also the only creature which will pollute our own drinking water, our own air and poison our own food.
We give the rule of unintended consequences meaning.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...there's just a massive apiary chondroitin deficiency -- it's the bee's knees.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
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.
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 about you than it does about scientists.
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.
I've known some vegan hippie computer scientists. The two groups are not mutually exclusive.
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"
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 it may be one of the key players."
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 is probably not the culprit
This doesn't refute anything that was put forth before. It doesn't demonstrate any causality whatsoever.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I raised bees in Texas back in the 1970's and it was common knowledge then that nosema was a hive killer.
NPR had an extensive piece on this parasitic fungus a number of weeks ago and its effects on the overall bee population. As I remember, they had a lot of detailed coverage on the scientists who discovered the phenomenon and have been monitoring/tracking it ever since.
I guess the crowd of shrill criers never miss a chance for bullshit sensationalism over thinking things through. Or, you know, looking at the rest of the news.
It's very easy to leap to the Isle of Conclusions, but it's a long swim back...
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.
This doesn't refute anything that was put forth before. It doesn't demonstrate any causality whatsoever.
Neither did the cell-phone argument. The cell phone argument can't be refuted because it didn't put anything solid forward to begin with, it was more or less self-refuting. At least this, although inconclusive, is still a lot more solid that what we had before.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
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 similar terrorist style green initiative organizations that just want to bring "the man" down a notch.
Global Warming has become an accepted idea in scientific circles, and any who say otherwise, or even attempt to be rational about new research, or saying otherwise are tossed without even examining the results, or just flat-out attacked. Both sides are completely abhorrent to the thought that either could be wrong, and due to that, we'll all just have to wait another 30 years or so when the climate takes a downturn. The process begins a new, 30 years more of empirical data to skew either way, and by then, media will be even better at spinning it.
With the climate change issue, people often claim that there exists a consensus among scientists that indeed climate change is real and is a result of human activities, however again you almost never get any citation or way to verify these claims.
Not is all lost though! It can be very easy to find out the facts for yourself, unfortunately very few people realize this in large part because of the inadequate education provided in the mandatory science classes in high school...but that's another matter. In the case of the bees, and the public health risks of cell phones that the article assures us are real and very scary, you can go to a website like http://aps.org/, click on "Policy and Advocacy" and then, "APS Statements" where you will see a statement titled, "Electric and Magnetic Fields and Public Health" (http://aps.org/policy/statements/05_3.cfm) click on it and you'll get a very clear, concise, nontechnical, authoritative stance on the issue at hand. Statements like these, by societies such as the APS, define scientific consensus. You aren't likely to get much better or more satisfying or useful answers than that unless you spend 10 or so years getting a PhD in the field and then a few more years after that researching the topic.
I know this wasn't exactly a short post, but I hope it is clear and helpful for you. Finding out the facts on your own is the best way to go about things dealing with science. In this case it took me about 30 seconds to find what I was looking for to make this post (the APS statement) so it isn't like there is a big time investment to find out for sure. You can probably find statements like this in less time than you would otherwise spend thinking "who should I believe?" Remember, journalists usually aren't scientists, they usually have no idea what they are writing about but even so some do an excellent job; don't trust articles that don't back up claims with verifiable sources. The New York Times generally does a pretty good job (even though their journalists need to learn to stop using the word "theory" in the vernacular).
*They do cite some sources in the article, but they make many claims that go without any citation.
Wikipedia article on the APS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_So
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.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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.
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.
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