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."

Comments

Why blame everything else?

[guruevi]

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?)

Re:Why blame everything else?

[Red Flayer]

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?

[CODiNE]

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. ;-)

I blame the bees...

[BenSchuarmer]

they shouldn't use cell phones while flying.

Re:Can't be right

[SatanicPuppy]

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).

A simple solution - make them stronger by...

[csoto]

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

Re:Cellphone don't kill bees...

[je ne sais quoi]

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:Swing that razor one more time.

[flyingsquid]

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.