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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?
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
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 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.
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 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!
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.
Several countries (most notably China) already use armies of human workers wandering around with pollination brushes in order to pollinate crops that used to be taken care of (for free) by bees.
This sort of thing falls squarely in the realm of "ecological services" provided by the various natural systems we humans are busily degrading or outright destroying.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
Funny the bees had no problems back in the 70s when the GSM band was UHF television channels 70-83. Because you'd think that if little 3-5 watt transmitters are killing the bees, then high power broadcast antennas would have had some noticeable effect.
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
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.