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Study Claims Cellphones Implicated In Bee Loss
krou passes along word from Telegraph.co.uk that researchers from Chandigarh's Punjab University claim that they have proven mobile phones could explain Colony Collapse Disorder. "They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives — one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two 15-minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed. After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey. The queen bee in the 'mobile' hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive. They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen." We've talked about the honeybee problem before. Today's article quotes a British bee specialist who dismisses talk of cellphone radiation having anything to do with the problem.
We need a term to describe things which appear to be science but in fact which are not.
Um... pseudoscience?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I say this is simply ridiculous. It's not uncommon at all for a beekeeper to lose half of his hives in a season due to mites, foulbrood, starvation, genetics, poor management or any number of other known and unknown reasons. It's not uncommon for someone with two hives to lose one or both of them over a 3 month period -- the length of this study. The comparison of two queens is bogus too. The variability in quality (genetics) between two queens from even the best breeders can be enormous. Having read many studies about honeybee management I can say beekeepers insist on much better science than this. Proper studies involve groups of hundreds of hives; control for genetics, disease, management practices; and occur over multiple seasons.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php?campaign=th_rss_science
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
We've done that experiment thousands of times in this state for darn near a quarter century here. It's called a ... farm.
Its almost a stereotype that farmers on the perimeter of town lease a tiny plot of land for a tower, or lease the top of their grain silo, or lease the tippy top of the barn roof, etc.
Generally the lease payments are enough to maintain the structure and/or the driveway leading up to the structure, not so little as to barely buy a beer and not so much as for the farmer to retire. I have two relatives in the farming business, one in sheep (well, that sounds completely inappropriate) and the other in corn and somewhat in vegetables, I know what I'm talking about here.
Note that farmers in general and dairy farmers especially are very much tuned in (bad pun) to EMF and electromagnetic fields. First of all because its almost a stereotype that all their heavy electrical gear is in disrepair and they have to keep their wits about them or they'll get electrocuted, and secondly, dairy farmers attach metal/electrical milking machines to a part of the cow anatomy where very few female mammals, humans included, enjoy having even the smallest electrical current flow.
I suppose it depends a lot on where you live, but around here its "normal" for farms to have a couple hives, or to rent some hives during pollination season.
Given that base stations run 10 - 20 dB more power than a handheld, any electromagnetic effect would harm the bees/whatever about 10 - 20 dB worse.
Since the reported effects from the very low power handheld transmitter are terrible, then every time for the last quarter century, simply driving a pollination truck onto a farm that rents basestation space should result in all the bees dying like instantly. But they don't.
Also most "medium and up" farmers have some form of radio network. Think technology like CBs, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. Anyway, that RF source seems to have had no effect for at least 50+ years.
Hmm. I wonder if all of reality is wrong, or maybe, just maybe, the crackpot report is wrong.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
While similar in appearance, neither of the cases you describe are typical of CCD.
What likely happened here was war (beekeepers call it "robbing"). The hive you describe from March was the defender in an all out war with another hive, the other hive likely took heavy losses as well. The pile of dead contained bodies from both. That was the battlefield. The attacking hive may have also died completely during the war, which is why there was still honey in the victim hive.
The winter loss you describe is indicative of the attacking hive in a similar war. An attacker that didn't win. Or perhaps did, but didn't gain enough honey for the queen to survive the winter. For some reason they lost all their honey stores (This can happen if yet another hive robbed them, or if the queen kept laying too many workers for the stores to support for too long after the nectar flow stopped). After the hive eats all its stored honey, it turns on neighboring hives.
CCD looks similar to these losses, but both honey remains (until it's scavenged by others) AND there are no dead bees to be seen. Such that it looks as if a perfectly functional hive just up and left.
My two hives went to war last summer, and the carnage was unbelievable. Hundreds of thousands dead in a pile in front of the "victim" hive. I didn't know why they went to war at the time, but now I know that 70,000 bees can consume a massive store of honey pretty quickly if they have no work to do. And I've also learned that if 3 days don't go by without rain, flowers don't produce enough nectar for bees to have any work to do. (It was VERY rainy here last summer)
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