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The article says that the bee problem happened first in the U.S., then in Europe. Mobile phones became popular first in Europe, then in the U.S.

The timing seems wrong.

The article says that the bee problem happened first in the U.S., then in Europe. Mobile phones became popular first in Europe, then in the U.S.

The timing seems wrong.

Another problem with that theory is that the article states that the usual conditions found after a hive is abandoned are not found in these cases. Without going back and quoting exactly, something to the effect that robber bees and other things that ordinarily take over the hives shun these hives.

So how could cell phone radiation cause these various after effects?

I have reached a conclusion: Government grants are leading to the corruption of universities in particular and all research in general.

Witness the millions upon millions given to universities and other organizations to study global warming. They HAVE to find something wrong or they do not get any more grants. You do not get grants to study something that you have found to be perfection.

Congress should severely restrict grants, but they will not because all congressmen want the major universities and research organizations in their districts to prosper.

End of rant.

The article says that the bee problem happened first in the U.S., then in Europe. Mobile phones became popular first in Europe, then in the U.S.

And doesn't Europe have a greater population density than the U.S.? Wouldn't there be more cell phones/unit area of bee turf?

The article says that the bee problem happened first in the U.S., then in Europe. Mobile phones became popular first in Europe, then in the U.S. The timing seems wrong.

Could it be something with the number of users/amount of microwaves? However, you'd think in Europe, the population is in a smaller geographical area, so therefore, it should have occurred there first...

Interestingly enough...check out this theory....

http://www.synchronizm.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/29/the-bees-who-flew-too-high/

Honeybees and Sunspots may be interacting in one of the most unwatched ballets since television was created. Metaphorically speaking of course: Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fishes, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.1 If there are processes in this universe of which we are unaware of the full scope, perhaps the only way to observe them is using the multi-camera metaphor. In this ballet - which has the tragedy of the prospect of agricultural collapse, the triumph of the idea of biological interaction with quantum processes, and the drama of far away forces dancing within our presences - we can become part of the dance as we expertly shift our camera views like an experienced television producer. In the process, a mystery may be solved, one making many of us (and perhaps not enough of us) nervous lately. Camera One: Honeybees The first reports began in November of bees mysteriously disappearing. Not just one or two, but entire colonies of tens of thousands of bees at a time. As temperatures have warmed and it has become safe to open hives, the extent of losses is grave: In Michigan, Terry Klein, vice president of the Michigan Beekeepers Association and a commercial beekeeper, said reports of huge losses are beginning to arrive. “One beekeeper started with 1,500 hives and had only 500 colonies left,” Klein said. “Over three or four more weeks, he lost 70 percent of those.”2 Assuming a winter population of approximately 20,000 bees, this would leave losses for one beekeeper at 27 million bees! The losses have been widespread in North America, with some beekeepers loosing up to 80 percent of their hives. Over 400 reports have come in from at least 22 states so far. Given the extent of losses, the most puzzling thing is the lack of dead bees: Although the bodies of dead bees often are littered around a hive, sometimes carried out of the hive by worker bees, no bee remains are typically found around colonies struck by the mystery ailment. Scientists assume these bees have flown away from the hive before dying. 27 million dead bees in a relatively small area should leave some physical evidence. Unless there is an extremely efficient physical process (like a phantom bee-eater) or a much wider geographical distribution of bee carcasses upon their demise, a very strange phenomenon is at work. Curiously, it has been noted that something similar happened in North America approximately 50 years ago. I’m a hundred miles behind myself - Beck, Milk and Honey Camera Two: Sunspots Sunspots follow an approximate 11-year cycle, corresponding to increases in solar activity. This solar activity causes geomagnetic effects during the peaks, but effects on earth’s magnetic field also occur during the minimums. Using these observations, scientists have predicted that the next solar maximum, expected to peak in 2010, could be the most intense ever. The measurement that allows the the prediction is called Inter-hour Variability. Combined with another observation on the sun, Physicist David Hathaway noticed a correlation that allowed prediction of solar activity 6-8 years later. In his observations, the last time something similar to the IHV measurements he sees today happened was about 50 years ago. I feel it coming and I’ve got to get out of it’s way - Nine Inch Nails, Sunspots Watching The Dance Aside from the fact that most children would use the same crayons to draw both sunspots and honeybees, how could they two be related? Barbara Shipman, mathematician and daughter of a bee researcher, first noticed something peculiar about the dance bees use to describe where pollen sources are located to other bees. Observed over 40 years by Karl von Firsh, these movements seemed an overly complex way to convey information, especially in insect behavior. No one had yet made sense of the dance the bee scouts performed on returning to a hive, but one thing was clear. All of the dance was based on a triangulation of the hive, the food source, and the sun. Shipman first studied bees because her father left the bee books in her room, and later studied them in her freshman year as a biochemistry major. It was not until she delved into mathematics that she penetrated the enigmatic mystery of the dance. She was studying flag manifolds, mathematical constructs used in projecting multi-dimensional phenomena into fewer dimensions when something from childhood became clear: One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three- dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The bee’s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the bee’s recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold, the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment dance. I wasn’t looking for a connection between bees and the flag manifold, she says. I was just doing my research. The curves were nothing special in themselves, except that the dance patterns kept emerging.5 Since then, researchers have discovered that things such as the polarization of the light of the sun and local variations of the earth’s magnetic field affect the components of the dance, suggesting bees have sensitivities that would require re-writing our biology, physics and cosmology texts from scratch: There is some research to support the view that bees are sensitive to effects that occur only on a quantum-mechanical scale. One study exposed bees to short bursts of a high-intensity magnetic field and concluded that the bees’ response could be better explained as a sensitivity to an effect known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or nmr, an acronym commonly associated with a medical imaging technique. nmr occurs when an electromagnetic wave impinges on the nuclei of atoms and flips their orientation. nmr is considered a quantum mechanical effect because it takes place only if each atom absorbs a particular size packet, or quantum, of electromagnetic energy. If this were not enough, the results imply that bees can perceive quarks, thereby interacting with the quantum world without disturbing it in the ways both observed and predicted by quantum theory. And this perception would have to extend to the perception of quarks not as coherent structures, but as fields. In other words, bees may be able to perceive the unobserved quantum fields of zero-point energy, the much-debated property from which all of the phenomenal world may emerge in the eternal quantum moment.

The article says that the bee problem happened first in the U.S., then in Europe. Mobile phones became popular first in Europe, then in the U.S.
The timing seems wrong.

It also points out that the usual empty-hive raiders won't go near these hives. Makes no sense.

Just my opinion, but I don’t think cell phones are the culprit.
Ever sence the Greenies got rid of the normal pesticides and forced changes to (supposedly) less toxic ones. This problem has grown. We now use nicotine pesicides and others that work down at the hormonal level. I blame the environmentalists for all this.

“They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees...”

The kind of “radiation” given off by mobile phones is radio waves. Radio waves have been around a long time, with no ill effects. OK, I’ll grant you that there are a lot more of them than there were before mobile phones, but my understanding is that bees are more sensitive to the ultraviolet spectrum than they are to radio waves.

More likely, this is a hit piece... Pseudo-scientists who have no idea what they are talking about trying to fool people who don’t know better.

The timing seems wrong.

I don't think cell phones have anything to do with it. If I remember correctly, bee keepers are having problems with some kind of mite (very small bug) that is infesting the hives and killing off the bees.