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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.
Before I BEE-lieve it
They only had 2 hives in their experiment?
Tell the damn queen to stop texting and get back to work.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It sounds like a very possible cause thing to investigate, but it would have been nice if there were more than just two hives involved in the experiment. I hope a follow-on experiment is done with more hives.
It will be very interesting if cell phones and bees come into conflict. Considering all the jack-assery that I've seen associated with cell phones, there's a part of me that would love to see then banned.
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.
So how do they know mobile hive didn't catch something that had nothing to do with a freaking cell phone, like bee stds or something.
There were millions of bees. The results are highly significant.
Clearly we are seeing a great contribution to science.
Deleted
I'm sorry, but if you have to place the cell phone right in the hive there's no way a hive more than five feet away from a cell phone 24x7 is going to be impacted by this.
Perhaps the bees just got really into texting to the exclusion of pollen gathering.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Waitaminute... I thought I read in Scientific American or somesuch that the recent CCD scare was actually just a surge in reporting in the media, not an actual dramatic increase in rates. Furthermore, most of the real cases were attributed to more mundane causes pesticides or the stress of a colony being moved...
Someone back this poor AC up with a link.
then the bees could have used the gps and google maps
Bees do find their way back to the hive by observing polarized light from the sun's rays scattering in the atmosphere, the frequencies involved are far, far different than the ~1GHz used in cell phone bands.
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 was talking to a fellow beekeeper on Quadra Island, which is in a very rural part of the province, with a population of about 2000 people. This beekeeper lost 470 hives out of 500 this year.
There aren't many people, and cellphone service is poor... I doubt there are many phones there.
I'm skeptical until a lot more research is done.
GSM and 3G signals should not have any effect of bees. As the waves are too big to have any effect of them. Wavelength of 900Mhz (and 850Mhz) is about 30 cm. It is slightly less at 1800Mhz and 1900Mhz.
In fact, the waves are bigger then bee in size in most cases.
This study needs to repeated few more times before any results can come from it.
I was going to suggest little teeny tiny earpieces for the bees, but then I got to thinking - isn't Bluetooth radio waves too? Will nothing save the bees and us from this onslaught of radiation!
Three Squirrels
... on the loudest setting AND vibrate mode! :)
Just kidding,
Paul B.
Poof!
Youtube already has it down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m5vt07W2n4
Have you no standard? It's a retarded newspaper that prints nothing but idiocy.
Christ! What's next on slashdot? Healthy eating research article from Burger King's site? That only features stuff from their menu?
Maybe they're just going back home to Melissa Majoria.
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
“Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.”
-Chuck Palahniuk
How much additional heat would the 15-minute per day cell phone sessions plus the phone being in "Stand-By" 24/7 produce in the hive? My guess is it might increase the temperature a couple of degrees.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
And as another poster mentioned, Current Science Online isn't peer reviewed, it's meant as a means of communication and is fairly open.
I like the conclusion of the article: "We are fortunate that the warning bells have been sounded and it is for us to timely plan strategies to save not only the bees but life from the ill effects of such EMR."
They are taking those Nokia GSM cellphones seriously! Set those phasers to stun...
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/index.html
... who verified that humans can, in fact, engage in photosynthesis.
No, they had four. Two treatment (T1 and T2), one placebo (B, a dummy phone), one control (C). You wouldn't know it though, the data sheet in the paper shows only two columns, one titled control and one titled treatment. No mention of the placebo, no indication that there are two treatment groups, no test statistic (or it's power) is reported, no model is ever described.
(Direct link to paper: http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25may2010/1376.pdf)
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.
The next step is to run more tests with more hives, and more test groups (with - as suggested elsewhere in the discussion - graduated exposure levels)
Not to run around like a headless chook claiming the preliminary test actually means anything.
1. Do limited unscientific test.
2. Profit!
3. ???
Yeah! I just thought the same!
How big is the chance that the oposite observation would have been the case?!
Similarly: I just made an controled experiment using a coin. Me and my 1 year younger friend got each a coin and threw it up. We agreed that head would win. He got tail, me head. So now we know, older people win when playing Head or Tails.
Still wonder to which news site to post this...
I used to work with Marty Cooper and that guy is all about buzz.
There is no way he would hurt bees.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
That'd generate the kind of data we're actually looking for wouldn't it?
Definitely not! I like my phone and mobile devices, so any empirical evidence which inconveniences me would have to be rationalised away in any case. I'm pretty confident the study would turn up nothing at all. It's almost axiomatic that what's good for me is good for the world. The research money would better be spent increasing coverage by erecting more transmission towers and the like.
And yeah, Honey is bad for your health.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I"m glad to see so many had the same initial reaction as I did. If there were 50 hives rather than two and the trend continued then I'd say they were on to something. In this case it's not all that clear. Was on hive just more efficient and effective than the other? Was on geographically located so it had to cope with different environmental factors? Bad genes?
Hopefully they'll try this with a respectable sample size sometime soon.
I think this one seems more valid than cellphones: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100525154002.htm from http://antfarm.yuku.com/topic/9954 ...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Correlation does not imply causation.
See also: Scientific method
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Hey guys. Here's the skinny of it all. Posting ANONYMOUS because it isn't worth the libel and slander of any effort against me to waste my time any more of whom I've to blame
I am an active part-time Apiarist. Been that way ever since a kid, because I'm poor and insects are cheap fun that give me a God-complex of love over helping the little stingy creatures in my hands. From prior ventures in Construction I've accumulated enough window-screen and plastic-polymer sun-screen that I was able to cover my entire backyard into three cube sections each with two colonies in them. In the section with the plastic-polymer sun-screen that gives absolutely no breeze and complete isolation from the environment, I reared two colonies of bees on natural heirloom flowering plants and used air-conditioners to keep the moisture levels steady and supplemented artificial lighting to keep the nectar flowing through more seasons. In the other window-screen enclosure, I planted your Home Depot variety of GMO'd flowers and such that produced plenty of nectar just they are written GMO'd on them. If you ever visit a garden Nursery to buy your flowers, much of the plants being sold today no longer have butterflies and bees swarming them because they've been GMO'd to the point that their odor and nectar is unappealing or poisonous. In the 3rd enclosure, it is completely cut-off from all flowering plants of any kind and the colony is reared on a sugar-cane solution I've developed myself and all the time while aerial-spraying the bees with a Titanium Oxide solution that is apparent as an atmosphere conditioner that I encountered in Los Angeles County.
You wouldn't believe what the results are.
The results of my Bees under House-arrest is that the bees that consume Homo Depot potted-plants' pollen and nectar in the open-atmosphere window-screen enclosure proved that the bees are dying from diseases encountered through seriously week Immune Systems all because the GMO'd pollen and nectar physically hurts them; what kills them most is Fungal Infections, no mites in any of my bees because they are under House Arrest in each of their caged cubicles. The next enclosure that is closed-circulation in a Sun-screen plastic-polymer tent is they are thriving like any colony should, rougly 40k bees in the towers. The last enclosure, the one where the bees were again closed-off from the atmosphere like the other ones and fed on a reliable solution of my own making, yet aerial-sprayed with Titanium Oxide, they all encountered almost the same kinds of Fungal Infections as the open-atmosphere bees that were only allowed Homo Depot GMO'd plants.
That's all there was to it, fellas. The contracts to the Aerial Spraying over Los Angeles is similarly available here as cloud_seeding_draft_mnd_final.pdf.
It's bad enough that all the CORN Pollen of GMO's plants has killed all the Monarch Butterflies. You'ld think you all would take a hint that Bees aren't the only insects dying.
It's costed me 4 dead colonies, over $2k of actual materials and 5 months of electricity for the test sites not including rent if were done on another premise, and all I got were obvious results that didn't have any tests to do with cell phone radiation. I would be more concerned with Cell-phone TOWERS and what effects they could have because those frequencies are resonating at frequencies of water that all life forms around them might be affected by. I've heard stories about Army communications officers and technicians, as well as ARRL HAM-licensees, getting all kinds of diminished Immune Systems and cancers from working over 5 hours a day in constant contact with these energy fields.
Umm...no, it is not well established that "cell phone radiation" aka radio waves can disrupt cellular activity. Radio waves don't have enough energy to break carbon bonds, refer to the standard issue electromagnetic spectrum diagram which means they can't affect cells.
Where? Such an amazing discovery would easily make it into a peer-reviewed journal, assuming the science behind it is good. After all, a whole lot of physics indicates that microwaves are too weak to do anything other than heating.
Oh, I see. You have based this assertion on a rather....eccentric self-published document. One that doesn't really appear to understand much of electromagnetism. AFAICT, they've re-discovered the microwave oven. Gee, that's far less impressive, since those are well understood and require hundreds to thousands of watts of RF instead of milliwatts from those evil cell phones.
Btw, the journal explains "The Ecolog [sic] Institute in Hannover has produced a remarkable document that carries the independence and decency of the Bioinitiative Report". The Bioinitiative Report was another self-published document without any peer review. So...we're stacking crap upon crap and pretending that means it's respectable.
As for Cross Currents...Becker's (and your) major problem linking RF to disease is that people are exposed to far stronger electromagnetic effects by going outside. Clothing and hats block high-energy EM like UV and visible light, but don't do anything against the RF coming from the sun. Why didn't that kill us all when we first descended from the trees?
Nor does he do anything to explain why the people living near TV and radio antennas for the last 90 years or so don't have a higher mortality rate.
Btw...got a microwave oven? It leaks more RF than your cell phone can produce. How come microwave ovens didn't cause a massive flood of deaths in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s or 2000s?
Please stop giving science a bad name. Real science is hard, long, and very unlikely to make you famous. "Scientists" (and I use that term loosely) around the world try to short-circuit that process, and they are always wrong. I would be happy if one of the anti-cell phone people actually manage to prove anything, because it's the world-upturning discoveries that make science exciting. But these people are not it....they will, however, sell you cures for the disease they claim to have found.
From a cyberfriend, "Amish beekeepers are also effected, I know a lot of people who leave their hives up in the hills or prairie area no where near a cell phone, and almost no one in the US keeps GPS units in their hives nor is that consistent with CCD cases. So the cell phone theory is once again wrong."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Seriously, when you posted Guardian under your "legitimate" sources, you lost your credibility.
And what the hell is huffington post?
Tag this story !science, because it certainly does not cite anything scientific, only a huge pile of crap from which no conclusion can be drawn.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
...tell me what's happening.
Hang on, my iPhone is ringing.
Considering that last year two different groups, in the US and UK, announced effective biological cures for "colony collapse", I doubt it has much to do with cell phones.
How many different explanations have we heard for colony collapse disorder so far? Five? Six? Is there any particular reason I should believe this one more than the others?
... 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.
Obviously this isn't conclusive, but I would assume that hives on the top of skyscrapers would be far more susceptible to cell-phone interference, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence of this happening here.
Prior to being used for GSM cellphone service, the 800 - 900MHz frequency band was UHF television channels 70-83. So to accept this theory you have to believe bees are affected by the low power transmitters in cellphones but had no problem with massive high power antennas broadcasting in the exact same frequency back in the 70s.
This type of experiment needs a very good control. First of all, cell phones tend to carry a lot of microbes, so you don't want to kill off the colony simply by introducing a pathogen that wasn't present on the control. Second, did the phones do anything detectable by bees when they were activated? Noise (ringing or just electrical), lights, etc.? Because I would suspect that if the bees think they need to fend off an intruder deep in the hive twice a day they'll likely be more stressed and less productive. Third, did the phones emit more heat than the control?
IMHO, a better study would have a group of hives in range of a single tower that can be turned on and off at will. Let them get established, turn it on, see if the numbers change, turn it off, see if the numbers change, turn it on again, etc. (Crossover study.)
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.
To quote Wolfgang Pauli: "Not even wrong".
(or rum)...
A preacher stood up to deliver his sermon, and silently took out two clear glasses. Into one he poured God's clean water and into the other he poured the Devil's brew--hard liquor. From his pocket he produced two worms--one of which he dropped into the glass of water, and one which he dropped into the liquor.
The first worm sank gently into the water, wiggling about happily for all the congregation to see. The other, on touching the rum squirmed frantically before stiffening and sinking immobile to the bottom of the glass.
Finally, he stepped back, looked hard at the sinners before him, and challenged anyone to doubt the implications of what they had just witnessed regarding the nature of pure clear water and the Demon, Rum.
One old drunk in the back row stood up and shouted "Hell no--If you drink whiskey, you'll never get worms!"
It frustrates me that so many people sincerely believe that this sort of sloppy thought process is how science works.
And, it frightens me that these people use the same lack of investigative and logical rigor to make decisions that affect all of us.
You don't have to be intelligent or educated to operate a bullshit detector. We all have one (OK, not that kid with the genetic defect where she trusts everyone, but she's rare). Heck, it doesn't even take that much effort.
I bet if Wal-Mart sold a cheap Taiwanese model, everybody would buy one. Then use if for a week, and forget about it, though!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
What I mean is proper phone dummies would need to be phones in every way, save for the actual cellular radio. You'd want to remove or disable the radio in an actual phone and have it in there. It would also need to be turned on, as the real phones were. This would make sure it wasn't due to the heat, or light, or mechanical vibration, or any of the other things that the phone might do to disturb the bees.
However, as I noted in my other post, it still isn't a useful test because of power levels. A class 1 phone (which is what you find in most of the world except the US which has lower limits) outputs 33dBm power max. A good signal from cell towers is -80dBm. That means the power you get from being next to a phone is about 20,000,000,000 times more powerful than what you get from the cell net.
I think what people need to understand is that yes, CCD is a real, serious thing. However that doesn't mean that the first crackpot theory that comes along is right.
This is just more of the general anti-radiation paranoia that has been going on for, well, since we knew what radiation was. Another part of that would be humans and power lines. There was a bunch of paranoia that living near high voltage power lines would cause problems in kids because of the radiation. Now never mind that this is extremely long, non-ionizing waves, no people were sure it caused cancer and all kinds of other problems.
Well, studies were done. I am probably a data point in one of those studies since as a kid, I grew up in a house near high voltage distribution lines. We now have many decades of information and guess what? They don't cause any problems. The kids who lived under them, who are now adults, don't show any difference in cancer rates or anything else from the general population.
This is the same shit, different field. Bees start dying for some reason that nobody understands so the anti-radiation nuts go "Oh my god it has to be cellphones! All that radiation is killing the bees!!" No proof, just wild speculation.
Umm...no, it is not well established that "cell phone radiation" aka radio waves can disrupt cellular activity. Radio waves don't have enough energy to break carbon bonds, refer to the standard issue electromagnetic spectrum diagram which means they can't affect cells.
You're clearly not illiterate. You clearly know how to think. So why are you ignorant on this subject?
There are numerous mechanism by which cells respond to modulated low-power EM well below the range where carbon bonds break. Just as an example, the Lithium ion sympathetically resonates at 60 Htz in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field, and moves on a vector so that it can more easily penetrate things like the Blood Brain Barrier. Thus when Lithium is present in the blood stream, when exposed to basic wall socket power, the chemical reactions increase in frequency and can do so to the point of mimicking the effects of a larger medicinal dosage of lithium when no EM field is present. The principal is called, "Cyclotronic Resonance". Just as a for-instance.
The state of knowledge the common people have on this subject is pitiful, and there is SO much information available. You just have to do some reading. Stop playing snotty Walmart Shopper and live up to your potential.
I've given you two sources to start from. You can find more. Only retards cling to ignorance and corporate PR as though it were some sort of trophy.
-FL
Gets them every time.
I don’t think the experiment is so much about whether mobile phone networks affect bees. Possibly they do, and some proper research is, I think, warranted.
;)
The experiment tries (with a tiny sample size) to shows something else:
In the experiment, the phone was as close as it could get to the hive, and was only active for 15 mins/day. This resembles more of somebody talking on a mobile phone for 15 mins/day. And if that could adversely affect bees, then it could also adversely affect humans, right?
After all, we're all living beeings. (I had to put that pun in somewhere. I just had to.
Which is why you read /. and not websites such as Plant Select, Proven Winners, Monrovia, and so on.
As someone who is very familiar with the tree and plant industry, the concept of hybridized plants affecting the bees is intriguing and maybe does merit some consideration.
I spoke to a customer today who wanted to know if we carried Bloomerang Lilacs. I have heard about them (they are an ever blooming hybridized lilac) from others but hadn't read much about them until today. These plants are certainly being modified in ways that make them very different than what nature intended.
Bloomerang are just one of many hybridized plants that are popular and available today. People love them. Nobody wants those boring old silver maples of 100 years ago, they want Autumn Blaze Maples, designed to grow fast, stay hardy, and have spectacular fall color.
-1 ignorant.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I spoke to a customer today who wanted to know if we carried Bloomerang Lilacs. I have heard about them (they are an ever blooming hybridized lilac) from others but hadn't read much about them until today. These plants are certainly being modified in ways that make them very different than what nature intended.
Don't anthropomorphize Nature, she hates when you do that.
Hybridization occurs all the time in nature. It's a completely natural process that bees and other creatures long ago developed means to deal with. There certainly is a chance that some odd combination of plants can result in something damaging to bees but it's extremely unlikely to happen and it certainly wouldn't have a widespread, worldwide effect on bee population.
We should definitely research all angles of this problem but, in the end, it may just come down to natural variation in the bee population or due to a number of small, natural effects. One thing we should do is develop other pollinators so that we aren't relying on a bee monoculture. There are many other types of bees and other critters that can supplement the pollination role of the honeybee.
Sapere aude!
What's scarier than radio affecting cells is that you had to explain that it doesn't. It doesn't take a lot of common sense to realize that we have been using radio for more than a century and broad spectrum use has been in effect since WWII and the Sun itself bathes the planet in more radiation than any human caused emissions. Had cellular function been impaired by radio, microwave or any of the EM waves bigger than visible light this planet would be barren and devoid of life. The scariest thing is that you would have to explain that, do people not have common sense to think about what they have been told? Is critical thinking dead?
There's only one way to explain this.
Sure, hybridization occurs in nature, but nature doesn't hybridize plants to become sterile as botanists do.
There are a ton of trees that are engineered to be sterile. Spring Snow Crabapple is a good example. A lot of people love how beautiful they are when they bloom in the spring, but they hate dealing with yard litter once they begin to fruit.
Of course, this doesn't always work. Some trees that are supposed to be sterile end up producing something. Cottonless cottonwoods occasionally produce cotton, for example. Seedless watermelons sometimes have some seeds.
Is that what nature meant? I agree with you that sure, nature does hybridize plants as part of evolution, apples are a great example. But these hybridizations occur over the course of a very long time, not over the course of ten years or so in a garden lab.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
...and I'll add that I know that this is not the likely primary cause of CCD, I just found the ideas interesting.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
No, it fucking doesn't, you scientifically illiterate cunt. This shows absolutely nothing. But keep adjusting that tinfoil hat.
I think this one is my favorite; It's ignorant, rude and wonderfully ironic.
It demonstrates in its simplicity the very soul of the knuckle-dragging scientifically illiterate hypocrite. "When the results come back with something which rubs your bias the wrong way, throw a tantrum and fling profanities."
-FL
From the end of the article, "in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives." I don't know much about the spectrum used for GPS devices, but it must not be a problem for German bees...
Just as an example, the Lithium ion sympathetically resonates at 60 Hz in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field, and moves on a vector so that it can more easily penetrate things like the Blood Brain Barrier.
Stop. You're killing me
Actually, I'm relying on the laws of physics, and the fact that the same frequencies have been used for 90 years at a lot more power with no ill effect.
Your cell phone can put out a maximum of 2W, but usually operates in tens to hundreds of milliwatts. Radio stations have been in the 50,000W range for a long time. 10,000W was pretty common going back to the '20s. Lots of people have lived close to these multi-kilowatt transmitters, and shown no ill effect.
Likewise, basic physics informs us of the energy contained in an RF photon in the frequencies used by cell phones. It doesn't have sufficient energy to break a chemical bond, the only known mechanism by which EM causes cancer.
Are you now going to claim that the radio industry has managed to keep secret their death rays for 90 years?
Only if we're particularly paranoid. Btw, do you own a microwave?
Apparently, you don't know what 'peer-reviewed' means. One of the key elements is you don't get to pick the peers that review your work, unlike the papers you've cited.
Only if you think that RF is a new invention of the cellular telephone. Again, 90 years, same stuff, no link to deaths. Have they been hiding it, despite how anemic our military was until WW2? It must have been quite visionary for Verizon Wireless to start covering up the damage caused by cell phones several decades before the company was founded...and before telephones, much less cellular telephones.
Only when your science is junk, as in TFA here. Then you of course claim it's a massive conspiracy to bury your experiments. Much like the Anti-Vax-yet-vaccine-inventor who lost his medical license recently.
Again, we've been using this at a much higher power for 90 years. Where's the pile of bodies?
The fact that you are unable to explain them indicates to me that this is a complete load of crap you want to believe in. If he had such a simple explanation, you'd be happy to share.
I'm an ex-microbiologist. I got well past 12. In fact, I'm absolutely sure I know more about science and living creatures than you do.
No, we've simply wasted enough time reading "proof" from frauds. The last one of these crap papers I bothered to wade through cited advertisements as scientific evidence of a link.
However you had such proof, you could easily summarize it. These are not hard questions. Let me list them again, so you can neatly summarize the answer:
I think Douglas Adams had it wrong -- it's not the dolphins who are going to exit Earth before we get blasted out of the solar system, it's the bees.
...who read the headline and thought it had to do with someone sneaking a phone into the National Spelling Bee and getting words texted to them.
The bees in the 'mobile hive' were busy calling other hives (who didn't respond because didn't have a phone) or simply sex-hotlines and thus didn't have time for procreation or food processing... :)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
To the best of my knowledge, there's no credible evidence that non-ionizing radiation (i.e. radiation that doesn't break bonds), causes anything other than heating/motion. If you absorb some radiant energy but not enough to break bonds you're just going to end up with faster-moving (i.e. hotter) molecules. This is the basic principle behind all forms of radiant heating, from the sun down to your microwave oven.
It's possible that certain cells in certain situations are unusually sensitive to heating in a way that's not obvious, and that such a sensitive might make the related organism respond poorly specific applications of RF radiation, but since everything on the surface of Earth is regularly exposed to a quite a bit of RF radiation from the sun this is typically not a concern, because the sun would have killed such organisms long before we discovered radio.
Did the mobile phones have hours of free talking time?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This study is lots of things. Scientific is not one of them.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Well, that would explain it all. The queen has been chatting on the mobile all day instead of raising her kids, and of course, if you flash your mobile around in a rough area, you are sure to get mugged, which explains why they don't return home. Case solved!
Not really, no.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Did anyone else read the OTHER article in the same paper that totally debunks the theory?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/iandouglas/100005223/mobile-phones-and-bees-shoddy-research-helps-no-one/
They should remove the foosball tables and free coffee and try the experiment again.
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.
Many things "could be" random chance. But if the probability of an events is low enough by itself, then even a single event can be sufficient to prove a cause and effect relationship.
But are we going to all give up our cell phones if it turns out that they cause problems with bees?
Most people wouldn't have to; just those living outside of major cities.
Nothing at all scientific about it, just observations from my backyard in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, while I haven't seen a honey bee since mid-last summer, the native bumble and carpenter bees are all over the place, with my strawberries, raspberries and apple trees having no pollination problems this spring. While I had noticed this, it hadn't registered until I was talking to a naturalist this weekend at a local park who had also noticed and is guessing the collapse of the European honey bees had allowed the natives to expand.
I have not RTFA but...I hope that they did not call or vibe the phone to see if it would have effect, because of course it would, put a cell phone in the middle of a wolf den, and call, and guess what ....you will see a family of animals move to a different den....all in all, it would have to have been a useless experiment to do that, they hopefully just turned the phone on, and let it sit there without being used, to see the amount of energy it gives off is high enough to unsettle the colony....but then again I didn't rtfa.
There are lots of different kinds of RF, and whatever effects there may be are likely to be wavelength dependent. The kind of RF that's used for cell phones now didn't use to exist much in nature. CB radios use completely different frequencies. And given that the devices were placed in the hives, they were not "very low power"; the bees were directly next to the antenna. Any effect in the wild may be more subtle.
These experiments are not conclusive enough for any action yet, and there's always the possibility of fraud or error, but calling them "crackpot" is not warranted based on what they said and published.
Actually, it's your analysis and your blanket dismissal of the possibility of these kinds of effects that are "crackpot".
Slashdot?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People aren't dying from old age anymore, just like the Bees and Butterflies. You just don't see any creatures falling over without pity for their selves: they're dying a slow agonizing process
People have just recently started dying of old age. For thousands of years prior, it's been many other things which have killed human beings.
The preliminary test test *does* mean something. They confirmed that powering on a phone in a hive *may* cause issues. If the test had come out the opposite (in the non-powered-phone, the hive was effected), then they could drop it. But the inverse happened. Can't say it was the phone, but can't rule it out either.
I know a farmer who is a beekeeper. I used to be a beekeeper myself. Over the past year, he lost all three of his stationary hives that he leaves out in the woods. I inspected two of them with him
The latest one that he lost was in March. In a matter of days, all the bees died within the hive as if they had been gassed or poisoned. None of the bees attempted to remove the old bees as normally happens. The "full complement" of workers was there in a pile at the bottom of the hive--nothing had dispersed. There was no smell of disease. And there was plenty of non-rotted honey left. Few predators or scavengers to be found in the hive eating the honey: no yellow jackets, and all the hive beetles were dead. A few spiders. Very, very odd.
The previous one died in December/January. The previous year, there had been plenty of honey left. This was a very productive hive. We opened it up after noticing the eerie silence near the hive and that the bees were not egressing for cleaning flights. Pushing on the hive, it rocked with ease which normally doesn't happen because these things can weigh well over a hundred pounds when healthy. There was absolutely NOTHING left in this huge hive. No honey, no workers, no brood, nothing. No honey. No dead bees on the outside. A healthy hive had just disappeared during the middle of the winter.
I find a little conflict here. The service out there is kind of sucky, and I don't see how he could have lost three hives in the last year and none in prior years when probably nothing has changed with the cell service out there aside from maybe a beam direction change.
Science is a method for obtaining data, testing hypotheses, and reporting results. The results of science, like virtually anything else, can be misused. The current atmosphere of decreeing that "science is marketing" or "science is biased" degrades the method which is NOT at fault. If we want to improve our understanding of nature and the universe then we need to learn, as a society to decouple objective results from interpretation, rather analogous to how society would be better served by a clearer decoupling of news opinion from news facts.
Unless this messes the bees up in a very fundamental level, it shouldn't take many generations for evolution to take care of the problem, if there's as strong an effect as this study claims. Wild bees might have a real problem, getting replaced by some other, less sensitive insect, and not being able to reclaim their place even after adapting to cell phone radiation. But "domesticated" bees have the advantage that no other insect can take their place, and once adaptation to cell phone radiation happens, that particular strain of bees will be spread by humans who want the honey.
Of course if it's not just bees but many other insects, then there might be far-reaching problems first for plants requiring insects for pollination, and as a consequence for pretty much everything, since everything depends on these plants, or something that depends on these plants, or something that depends on something that depends on these plants, or... you get the picture.
I was listening to an NPR article just last week about how bees closer to cities don't seem to be in as rapid decline as bees in more rural areas.
I would think there would be much more cell phones and other EM radiators around cities in the country.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Don't leave out blinding the test. After looking at the paper, they had to turn on the phones by hand and put them into the hive. It doesn't say if they left the phones in all the time and only turned them on periodically, or if they only put them in the boxes periodically.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
...don't give cellphones to your bees is the lesson here...? (blank stare)
Amen brother!
I'll never forget the look of confusion on my boss' face when he asked for my cell phone number and I told him I didn't own one. Of course, he thought I should buy one on my own so he could call me for work-related issues.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=saving-the-honeybee
http://research.cas.psu.edu/546.htm
Sciam and Penn State University published this last year showing that a "recently discovered pathogen, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), the presence of which is strongly correlated with hives suffering from the disorder"
Blaming cell towers and cell phones seems to be en vogue, but I don't see a lot of peer-reviewed entomology articles supporting this (yet).
> If the test had come out the opposite (in the non-powered-phone, the hive
> was effected), then they could drop it.
Which of course they would have done, without publishing their results. For every "successful" study like this one how many "failed" ones do you think go unpublished? And of the ones that are published how many get reported?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm an ex-microbiologist. I got well past 12. In fact, I'm absolutely sure I know more about science and living creatures than you do.
I know a lot of people who have collected a huge amount of knowledge who are still locked down with a multitude psychological knots which prevent a full scope of rational behavior. I know guys who can quote encyclopedias at me but who can't dress themselves properly or reconcile their own behavior patterns which prevent them from getting and maintaining jobs, friends, wives. And while those are gross examples, MOST people carry around quantities of emotional/psychological baggage rendering them emotionally and psychologically child-like in many ways.
Apparently, you don't know what 'peer-reviewed' means. One of the key elements is you don't get to pick the peers that review your work, unlike the papers you've cited.
I know what peer-reviewed means, thanks. And while there is a body of non peer-reviewed work in the sources quoted, there IS some which is. But you'd have to spend some time reading through the materials I've offered to see them. If you were a a microbiologist, then you have spent thousands of hours reading, and you ought to be very good at it. The prospect of reading one book and one paper shouldn't take you any time at all. I recommend the book especially; it cites a wealth of excellent science. And yes, peer-reviewed science.
3 questions. But they are the dividing line between science and quackery. If you answer them with an answer that is remotely coherent, I'll happily read your articles.
Okay, but I recommend the book over the paper.
1. Cell phones give off much less RF than other sources, including the sun, radio antennas and your microwave. Why are cell phones different? What physical phenomena of the RF signal from a cell phone makes it lethal, whereas leakage from a microwave is not?
Cancer is not the issue, (although it is certainly part of the story). The actual mechanics are not fully understood, but there are numerous suggested models. Basically, sympathetic resonance is the key. Here's one example, duplicated in different labs, which shows how low-power EM can affect cellular behavior. . .
A 60 Htz signal was used in the experiment. In conjunction with the Earth's natural magnetic field, (at the low end), through a process known as cyclotronic resonanace the lithium ion resonates, absorbs energy from the field and then moves on a vector when in a medium allowing motion. In this state, the excited ion is able to more readily penetrate the Blood Brain Barrier of the rats being used in the experiments. The effect was that trace quantities of lithium in the blood stream of the test animals, when excited by basic wall socket current, was able to deliver the equivalent of a much higher medicinal dosage of lithium.
That's just one example to illustrate how low power signals which are not capable of causing damage to chemical bonds are able to have an impact on cellular behavior.
2. Why was there been no spike in mortality surrounding large RF transmitters, including TV, radio and cell towers?
There have been many studies which strongly disagree with your base assumption. Numerous studies show that there are in fact spikes in leukemia among people living along power transmission lines, but I don't know how accurate those claims are. I find statistical studies of any sort hard to take entirely seriously simply because there are usually hundreds of other possible agents which might be involved but which are not examined by the study. In any case, I am far more interested in effects on cognition than I am in cancer.
3. Since RF in the frequencies used by a cell phone can not break chemical bonds, what is the mechanism by which damage is caused? And since we can repair most damage from powerf
First, the sun *does* emit a steady stream of 10-500 Hz radio waves -- it emits in a distribution much closer to a black body than white noise -- and has since long before WWII. It's the brightest astronomical source of just about all wavelengths below 1m (i.e. ~300 MHz), and a non-trivial emitter above that. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v161/n4081/abs/161091a0.html
The article you linked only suggests that what you are saying might be the case, and only under specific conditions.
That's very different from the claim that the Sun outputs a steady stream of such emissions.
There's a reason why radios still work when the Sun is shining. Biological systems are able to differentiate as well.
-FL
Why wouldn't they publish? I'd say that is just as worthy an article or paper than the one they published. A paper showing they found pretty strong evidence that cell phones don't disturb bees means everyone can stop investigating that avenue of research and looks for other things.
I mean, did they take the working phones and switch them to the hive that were health to see of the they too would drop in productivity... and to see if the unhealthy hive bounced back?
another Question.
is there possibly any difference between GSM, 3G, 4G, Edge etc networks?
You're totally right! And the moon is actually a liberal myth!
True, it's not at all well established to people who actually think it's important to understand what's happening before they act but it is 'well established' to the woo woos that seriously discuss the 'alien conspiracy' and what ever Bigfoot has done lately and such. The above post mentioning neonicotinoids is correct. We have the solution, now it's just a matter of verification and implementation. Well, that and opposing the paid mercenaries of the pesticide corps who want to keep making the stuff.
And I know many, many people who make shit up and then claim it's a major breakthrough. Your point?
No, you'd just have to supply a link to the peer reviewed papers. Yet you have not. It's just more hand-waving about 'the truth is out there'. I've wasted enough time following the evidence trails of crackpots. I will not waste further time until the "extraordinary proof" level has been reached.
Htz is the stock ticker for Hertz rent-a-car, not a unit of measure. I'm going to assume you ment Hertz, which is abbreviated Hz. Anyway, 60Hz isn't RF. Cell phones transmit in the MHz-to-GHz range.
The Earth's magnetic field doesn't cycle much within a small area, and definitely not at a fixed frequency.
As for the rest of your so-called example, you now have a 100+ year old technology that you claim is killing people, yet has not been linked to increased mortality. And considering your experiment contains fundamental flaws, such as believing the Earth's magnetic field pulses regularly, there really isn't reason to believe in the conclusions.
None peer reviewed. All the peer reviewed studies have failed to find any correlation.
I can easily create a study that proves Slashdot increases mortality. I can even make it sound good enough to convince you that it's true. It wouldn't survive peer-review.
Again, not peer-reviewed. Poorly designed studies showed a correlation when they compared the power-line denizens to the population as a whole. That correlation disappeared when they controlled for economic factors. People who live under high-tension power lines tend to be lower class, since the houses are cheaper. They experienced no higher rate of disease than other lower-class individuals.
So....we should only look at the studies that prove your existing beliefs?
I'm "stuck" on breaking chemical bonds because that is the only proven mechanism where EM causes disease.
Our immune system does not fight 'environmental toxins', assuming you mean pollution. Our immune systems fight disease. We do not produce antibodies against lead, for example.
Let me just take a moment to point out you're either using the wrong term, or made one up. Ion Cyclotron resonance is a known phenomena, but if you run the formulas in that Wikipedia article, you'll discover it requires a rather hefty magnetic field.
other examples of radiation exposure. . .of ionizing radiation maybe. microwave radio is not ionizing, it may have warmed the hive ever so slightly though? (seriously)
What was this "dummy" phone? The LCD, the battery, the internal electronics (PCB, anyone?), and god knows what will all be giving out low levels of many different chemicals.
Being "powered on" for 30 minutes a day may have very little or nothing to do with it. Indeed, it's more likely that, by warming the phone, it may exacerbate the chemical leakage, and thus be more likely to have an effect than the EMR itself.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...but the overall declines in bee populations seem to coincide roughly with the penetration of cellular networks into rural areas. I would suggest that more studies on this would be a good thing as the loss of bees has very serious implications for humanity. Even if the studies turn up nothing, at least then we will know, which is not something we can say about some random poster on the Internet waving his hands around and declaring "it's definitely nothing!"
I appreciate your insights, but you are not a scientist.
I am a researcher. And thankfully not as cynical as you.
Yes, this does make a difference. If they only did this with the "live" hive, then the results are suspect. If they did it with both, it may be OK, but not really. I assumed (poor Uma Thurman) that the phones were remotely powered on/off.
Sigh. The correct response was to not get all defensive. You disappoint me.
And I know many, many people who make shit up and then claim it's a major breakthrough. Your point?
My point was that knowledge doesn't imply wisdom. You are making this plain by avoiding the point by changing the subject. That's the behavior of a child.
No, you'd just have to supply a link to the peer reviewed papers. Yet you have not.
Yes I did. But you just chose to pretend that I didn't. Here's another link which performed a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed papers on the subject. . .
http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/JCO.2008.21.6366v1
Here's another sixty or so papers presented in a document which have been peer-reviewed/refereed before inclusion.
http://www.radiationresearch.org/pdfs/20090407_competence_genes_mobile_phones.pdf
It's just more hand-waving about 'the truth is out there'. I've wasted enough time following the evidence trails of crackpots. I will not waste further time until the "extraordinary proof" level has been reached.
Talk is cheap. I have my doubts that you've explored much of anything with that attitude. Also, if you had, you wouldn't be asking questions which show such basic pieces of ignorance in this field, so I'm going to call bullshit on you.
Htz is the stock ticker for Hertz rent-a-car, not a unit of measure. I'm going to assume you ment Hertz, which is abbreviated Hz. Anyway, 60Hz isn't RF. Cell phones transmit in the MHz-to-GHz range.
Oh, come now. Yes, I used the wrong notation. (But hey, it gave you the chance to show off your well-groomed dictionary knowledge.) Now dig into that knowledge base of yours and tell me what you know about, "Frequency Modulation". -Because biological systems will respond to both analog wave forms and those which are modulated from high frequencies. Again, the fact you don't know this common detail suggest to me that you need to research the subject and not wait around for so-called "extraordinary evidence" to show up without you having to look for it.
The Earth's magnetic field doesn't cycle much within a small area, and definitely not at a fixed frequency.
Yes, I know. The Earth's magnetic field doesn't have to move at all for the example I offered to work. I didn't say that it did, and if I gave you that impression then I do apologize.
As for the rest of your so-called example, you now have a 100+ year old technology that you claim is killing people, yet has not been linked to increased mortality. And considering your experiment contains fundamental flaws, such as believing the Earth's magnetic field pulses regularly, there really isn't reason to believe in the conclusions.
I think you need to slow down. You're mis-interpreting what I wrote and making false assumptions based on those interpretations. And I certainly don't think it's fair to place emphasis on the fact that, "I think this technology is killing people". That makes me sound hysterical, which I am certainly not. I've been quite clear in saying that whatever cancer risks may be present are not the focus of my interest. I'm interested in how EM can affect cognition and the nervous system in non-destructive ways.
I'm "stuck" on breaking chemical bonds because that is the only proven mechanism where EM causes disease.
"Proven" is a big word. You're talking about orthodox truth, which is spotty at best and agreed upon more by television broadcasters and public relations firms. And in any case, disease isn't the whole enchilada by a long shot. I keep telling you, I'm interested primarily in how EM affects cognition.
Honeybees are a non-native invasive species in the United State anyway. That's why they were call the "white man's fly".
So, evolutionarily speaking, there should be rather little difference between the reactions of bees to hybrids at home depot and flowers in Mississippi
What are you on?!! The information he's provided as both well reasoned and founded in reality which comes from direct observation of the matter in hand! What do you think science is? D'you think if you're not wearing a white lab coat and playing with test tubes "it's not science"??? I think you've been watching too many hair product adverts.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I just re-read my response, and I don't like my dismissive tone towards you.
Please forgive my poor attitude. I was just feeling dismayed with some of the attacks I'd been receiving lately from other rude and thoughtless posters elsewhere and I clumped you in among them. You are among the more moderate people and I do appreciate your willingness to engage in discussion. I know it takes courage to face the possibility of not knowing everything. Happens to me all the time, and it is never made easier when somebody is actively throwing mean-spirited words around.
-FL
pollinate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the Huffington post use to be a good site, but in the last years it publishes quack science as if it's true, and is an area infested with people who have no clue about science and think vaccines are bad.
So it' pretty much the Guardian .
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's what I assumed as well until i saw their picture of an example in the paper.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari