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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.
They only had 2 hives in their experiment?
that's a sample size that even andrew wakefield would have considered ridiculous
The grandparent from ms. Santax is a bee-keeper. He told me about the many losses of complete hyves in recent years, not only at his place, but with the 'competition' also. If this is truly the reason or of an influence of this magnitude as suggested by the article, then we really really really need to shut down those GSM-freqencies and fix it or find a better alternative. Cause else there won't be anybody left to call in about 40 years.
One study involving two hives doesn't even prove correlation, as it could be just random chance, as one hive will always do better than another hive. It is interesting and maybe worth doing some real studies.
But are we going to all give up our cell phones if it turns out that they cause problems with bees?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I mean, seriously.
And the bloody media come up with crap like "Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee" based on it.
"Study says", "scientists say". It's tealeaf reading. Crystal ball gazing. Science is nothing more than a marketing term to convince people to buy whatever they're selling.
We need a term to describe things which appear to be science but in fact which are not.
Deleted
I got three words for you: inverse square law.
If it takes putting a phone into the hive, then we're not really testing the effects of cellphones(as they are used IRL) on bees anymore.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
No, but here's some food for thought:
If commercial agriculture relies on bees to pollinate commercial crops ... and if the cell phones are killing the bees ... what happens when there's no bees left?
We stand to lose a lot if we lose bees. Research into their health is important to our ability to grow food.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
... if they banned cell phones. I made it through the first 35 years of life without one and I can make the rest of the way without one.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Either this modest little proposal of yours is a case of an epically poor sense of the mechanics of satire, or you're actually serious about this. Forgive me if I assume that it's the latter.
Before you embark on the journey towards that lofty goal, you might want to do a bit of research into this historical social phenomenon called Indentured Servitude and workhouses. They were, after all, some of the means by which the US economy operated in its early days. (The other was slavery, but that meddler Lincoln made sure we'd never get that back.)
You know, Charles Dickens, the Methodist movement and entire generations of the best and brightest in England, Europe and North America devoted their lives to ending this practice. If they knew you were proposing it again, they'd no doubt be rolling in their graves.
Shame on you for even considering this. Shame too on the moderator(s) who thought this was in any way insightful.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yes, you are correct. It's fairly likely that Colony Collapse is caused by feeding bees High Fructose Corn Syrup contaminated with hydroxymethylfurfural. Probably what happened was the phone uses a capacitance system to scan the buttons on the front. This scanning results in a high pitched sound that bees can probably hear and are probably annoyed by. Other things might be the phone smelled funny becuase a person had touched it, or the phone circuit board was treated with something toxic to bees. The only true test would be to put a sterile wire right in the hive and pump out 50W of power and see that nothing happens.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
We're not going to lose bees, thank you evolution. There are plenty of hives that have survived CCD, and while it may take a few years for populations to fully recover, we can be confident that Darwin has left us with the bees that naturally resist whatever the cause of CCD turns out to bee.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I was annoyed by the design of the test too (ignoring the obvious methodology flaws in the number of samples/etc.) Why did the inactive cell phones need to be dummies instead of just "off"? What if the bees are simply allergic to the batteries in the real cell phones? The test is obviously intended to examine the effects of the radio waves, since bees are not often in close proximity to cell phones themselves -- wouldn't a better test be to put in identical phones and simply disable the *radio* amplifier in one of the phones, so that the other conditions are as close to identical as practical? Or as you suggested, to simply pound the hives with radio sans any local electronics installation?
Orin Hatch tried that in Michigan... what was it called again... oh right "wellfare to work". You have to hold down a job earning a certain amount of money before you can get foodstamps. Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare... all that work and you still earn so little that you can't feed your kids without help...
That's not helping the economy (which is supposed to serve the population, not just the business OWNERS). And of course, it has obvious and logical side effects... when a single mother doesn't get to see her kid AT ALL, because she's working 16-hours a day to give him a roof and food, does it surprise you that he ends up shooting a classmate at the age of 7 ?
It's easy to say "where were the parents ?" apparently they were spending 4 hours a day on busses, to do 16 hours a day of work, and sleep 4 hours a day... for practically nothing.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yes, you are correct. It's fairly likely that Colony Collapse is caused by feeding bees High Fructose Corn Syrup contaminated with hydroxymethylfurfural.
No, it isn't. Bees are dying en masse on Organic farms where the bees aren't being fed anything but minimally-environmentally-contaminated pollen as well.
The only true test would be to put a sterile wire right in the hive and pump out 50W of power and see that nothing happens.
That would be stupid. The only true test is to keep your control group in a faraday cage, because ambient EM spill from cellphone communications is otherwise washing over them all the time. However, the only way you could feasibly do this would be to keep the experiment small, effectively keeping the bees inside, which is also unnatural.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"