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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
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.
There were millions of bees. The results are highly significant.
Clearly we are seeing a great contribution to science.
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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
So a more likely cause would be pollution?
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.
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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.
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.
I'm posting as AC because I already modded in this thread. I'm also feeling cranky because I have to go to work tomorrow so I'll take this to the ridiculous extreme.
I see comments like this from time to time and I'm not going to jump on DOD but instead depersonalize it. Whenever someone makes a comment about cell phones being banned, I would ask them to lead by example. Get rid of their phone and ask everyone you're with to turn theirs off or leave them at home (wife/husband/sig other/kids/parents/friends/whatever). I don't miss the days of staying home while on-call or using a two way pager and then having to find a phone. I laugh at the "old" movies where the chase is on but they stop to make a call to get backup or alert the victim to their impending doom. Or the cliche of waving down a passing car on a dark rainy to get assistance with (insert what you can't fix here). Or the time I walked to a farmhouse and instead of Frank N. Furter doing the Time Warp I was met by a pack of dogs. And the other things... GPS/maps/Internet/email/etc. I could go on but I'm not that clever. You get the idea. I'm not willing to give all that up because someone on the bus thinks they are important and they want me to think that too.
Oh, and for all the vaccine haters out there, I also don't miss polio.
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.
... on the loudest setting AND vibrate mode! :)
Just kidding,
Paul B.
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?
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.
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. ???
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
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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".
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.