OMG! Turn off that cell phone or we'll never eat again!

Actually.... cellphones are not causing bees to quit their hives. (But did the scientists study the stupid topics of conversation? Being forced to listen would make anybody quit their jobs.):



The Independent:

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

Spiegel Online:

Physicist Jochen Kuhn and his colleagues in Landau have studied the influence of high-frequency radiation on bee populations for years. In two pilot studies -- the latest one came out in 2006 -- the researchers just wanted to learn if there was any potentially bad effect at all. They arrived at a cautious conclusion, namely that bees exposed to strong radiation had a harder time flying back to their hives than unexposed bees. "Honeycomb area and mass showed a disadvantageous trend for the radiated bees," said Kuhn in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, "with no statistical significance."

Mobile vs. cordless phones

High-frequency radiation? Electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile-phone towers are high-frequency radiation. But that alone can't explain the bee deaths, because Kuhn's team used a base station for DECT telephones as a radiation source -- and DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) signals are used for cordless phones at home, not for mobile phones. "DECT and GSM (for mobile phones) use a number of different frequencies and a number of different modulation- and pulse-processes," Kuhn says. "We still don't know whether these (signals) have even a potential effect on bees. And, if they do, we don't know which ones.[snip] Basically they stuffed a DECT base station inside the hive, exposing the bees to an extreme not-found-in-nature radiation level.

The debate over the causes of bee deaths on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on a number of suspects:

• The American "Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group" has discussed something called "the AIDS of the bee industry." But it's not clear to anyone whether the busy insects might be suffering from a new, unknown sexual infection or a known one.
• Bacteria from genetically modified crops could affect the bees' intestinal surfaces and make them vulnerable, according to Hans Hinrich Kaatz from the University of Halle, in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE.
• Manfred Hederer, President of the German Beekeepers Association, told SPIEGEL that he believed the bees were dying from "some kind of poison, a certain active agent, which we have not discovered."
• Climate change is also on the list. Global warming has changed growth and blossoming periods of plants in many parts of the world, which in turn can influence animals.
• And now "mobile phone radiation" should be added to the list, or -- as The Scotsman put it over the weekend -- "emissions from mobile phone towers."

One last theory: Overcultivation

Jürgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of Würzburg, is sceptical about the mobile-phone theory but still calls it "worth researching." It's known, he says, that honeybees are "react with extreme sensitivity to changes in the earth's magnetic field." Tautz plans to let a working group he's organized study the question of whether some unpleasant interaction might exist between radio networks and honeycombs.

[snip]

But it's still a matter of debate whether the bees are healthy and unstressed. Professional beekeepers have warned for years about rising problems in their colonies:

• Varroa mite disease, from Asia, with the discouraging Latin name varroa destructor, has threatened European bee populations for over 20 years.
• Because farmers spray wildflowers as weeds and prefer monoculture -- planting the same crops year after year on a given plot of land -- the bees' range of nutritional food has shrunk.
• Beekeepers also list the introduction of so-called green genetic engineering as a potential problem. But the actual acreage of these open-air experiments in Germany represents less than 0.1 percent of the nation's total cultivated area.

Another explanation -- one not unknown among apiarists -- may be even more important. Tautz believes that intensive beekeeping may itself be one of the main problems. Raising dense colonies of bees narrows the genetic pool for a population, and less genetic variation weakens any species. In Turkey, where bees haven't been cultivated as intensely as they have in Germany, for example, mass deaths like the ones observed now in Europe and the United States would be unimaginable.

Update: John Blatchford has a good overview of what is going on in the United States and Europe and offers a discussion thread.

Update: Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake has more.