Add this one to global warming/cooling, acid rain, Y2K, ozone hole, etc
The timing seems wrong.
NEXT!!
Could you give me a brief description on the theory on how cellphone towers would wipe out bees? Is it just the radiation???
If only we could find something that would wipe out idiots and politicians.
It's all those funky ringtones that drive them crazy.
How about we clone more bees?
Make up for the loss and then some.
Just a thought.
OK. So does this mean if we all are talking on cell phones out by the swimming pool this summer then the bees will go away?
From Environmental New Service: (no mention of radio waves)
Honey Bees Dying of Mysterious Disorder
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pennsylvania, January 29, 2007 (ENS) - A die-off of honey bees has beekeepers struggling for survival and farmers worried about whether bees will be around to pollinate their crops this year.
An affliction recently named colony collapse disorder, CCD, has decimated commercial beekeeping operations in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States,” said Maryann Frazier, apiculture extension associate in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses.
Initial studies of dying colonies revealed a large number of disease organisms present, with no one disease being identified as the culprit, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
Ongoing case studies and surveys of beekeepers experiencing CCD have found a few common management factors, but no common environmental agents or chemicals have been identified.
“Preliminary work has identified several likely factors that could be causing or contributing to CCD,” said vanEngelsdorp. “Among them are mites and associated diseases, some unknown pathogenic disease and pesticide contamination or poisoning.”
There was a similar problem in the late 50’s early 60’s.
I suspect that there is something else going on, but cell phones might be a factor.
This is a troubling development where bees are concerned because they are essential in the pollination process for much of the fruit we eat. Where mobile phone radiation is concerned time will tell ... it's my opinion that down the road 10 or 15 years from now tumors in the cranium will become a concern and big news item. People who spend hours each day with a cell phone stuck to their ear (like many teenagers) will be the first to succumb to this health threat.
Just more proof that you can be stung... by a dead bee.
http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/animals/afrhonbee.shtml
This is likelier culprit than cell phone towers. The only way to get rid of them is to destroy the entire hive. The Africanized bees are not good honey producers and are more aggressive. Keeping bees is much more difficult than before so fewer people are keeping bees.
Something does seem to be disrupting the navigation of bees. Hives are being found with the queen and a few workers while all the other workers are MIA. Workers depart to gather pollen. If they cannot find their way back, it makes sense they are dying individually while lost. Nobody has found "clumps" of dead bees and millions and millions have died. It seems logical they are dying alone, some distance from the hive.
Unlike Varroa Mites which kill bees in the hives, this recent massive killing is very unusual.
As a former beekeeper, I don't think this is funny and it is going to impact us.
I read an article on this a few weeks ago. Here’s a link and some of the info from the article:
But David Hackenberg and many of his fellow beekeepers think they know what is killing their bees: an increasingly prevalent class of insecticide called neonicotinoids that they suspect for the following reasons:
- Neonicotinoids have been strictly limited in France since the 1990s, when they were implicated in a similar mass die-off.
- The use of neonicotinoids has spread rapidly in recent years as the hives began collapsing.
- Neonicotinoids are artificial forms of nicotine that act as neurotoxins to insects, entomologists say. That may account for worker bees neglecting to provide food for eggs and larvae, and for a breakdown of the bees’ navigational abilities.
The first widely used neonicotinoid was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994, and quickly became popular, said Mark Mossler, a plant medicine expert at the University of Florida.
Neonicotinoids are less toxic to humans than most old-line pesticides and, because they are absorbed by the plants, can be narrowly focused to the pests that feed on the treated crop. But because the chemicals are taken up by the plants, they are likely to appear in nectar and pollen of crops that cover vast areas.
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/04/08/Floridian/One_beekeeper_s_chaos.shtml
Personally I think the cause is the Illuminati, fluoridated water and the Joooooooooooooooos.
Looks like Karl Rove has been busy as a bee!!!!