Cell phones have been around a long time, why didn’t they affect the bees long before now?
Why are 30% of bees able to do what 70% can’t, that is, find their way home?
I keep seeing this article, but I haven’t seen any experiments published, seems like this theory could be tested rather easily.
Everyone, shut off your cell phones until all the bees get home!
It’s probably 802.11g. /sarcasm
And now that most cell phones are digital (replaced the old analog systems) the power output is drastically lower.
Personally, I think it's Algore's fault because his carbon offsets purchases from the company that he owns aren't truly erasing his carbon footprint.
That can't be! The article states that the problem began last fall. So how could there have been cell phones before that?
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.
But bees are in danger, Tautz said to SPIEGEL ONLINE. Their range of food has narrowed; in the meantime the climate has warmed and genetically modified foods have become part of their daily environment. Mobile-phone radiation could be one of the many new stress factors that bees have to contend with, he says. "But I'm sure mobile-phone signals would have no effect on a healthy, unstressed bee population."
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.