May 30, 2010
Bee-Gone

Scientists in India are claiming to have found strong evidence that cell phones are the root cause of the crashing honeybee populations in Europe and North America. The study seems to have been done correctly, and also appears repeatable enough, so further research should go a long way toward confirming or denying the hypothesis.

Posted by scott at May 30, 2010 07:19 AM

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Sort of done right. Sounds similar to the cancer studies of yore - if we feed a rat 600 times the normal dose of product A, does anything happen? Nevermind that to get that dose a normal human would have to drink a swimming pool's worth of whatever it was.

It's certainly interesting - that's for sure. But other factors could play a role in this. We've had electronic communications going on for a relatively long time, so why now? I realize there's a correlation with increased cell usage, but it's not like we weren't flooding the airwaves with radio, TV, CB and the like prior to that.

Posted by: Ron ap Rhys on May 30, 2010 08:29 AM

Possibly because the TV/radio/CB broadcasts transmit the same signal over a huge area, so the bees in a given area adjust to the signal that's warping but not blinding their direction sense.

Cell towers, on the other hand, broadcast many different signals over much shorter areas (cells, as the name says). Bees who cross the boundary between one tower's signal and another's find themselves using the new tower as their reference point for trying to return home, and end up starving or being eaten by predators and generally never returning to the hive. Combine this with the fact that additional cells are added as more phones are activated in a given area, causing the boundaries that get bees lost to shift faster than they can adapt to, and I could see how it happens with cell towers but not broadcast signals.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian on June 3, 2010 01:15 PM

CB wouldn't fall under that classification, but it's mobile and intermittent enough that it may not be a problem.

That could be the problem, though. It could be.

Posted by: Ron ap Rhys on June 3, 2010 09:09 PM

We don't know a whole lot about bee senses, but insect senses in general are so highly specialized that they can be fooled by the oddest things sometimes. Moths and beetles that can't stop flying in circles around lights because of the tricks the non-parallel electromagnetic rays play on their senses, for example.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian on June 4, 2010 11:37 AM
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