Study Claims Cellphones Implicated In Bee Loss 542
krou passes along word from Telegraph.co.uk that researchers from Chandigarh's Punjab University claim that they have proven mobile phones could explain Colony Collapse Disorder. "They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives — one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two 15-minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed. After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey. The queen bee in the 'mobile' hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive. They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen." We've talked about the honeybee problem before. Today's article quotes a British bee specialist who dismisses talk of cellphone radiation having anything to do with the problem.
Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Funny)
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I agree. One study involving 2 hives does not conclusively prove causality.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Insightful)
One study involving two hives doesn't even prove correlation, as it could be just random chance, as one hive will always do better than another hive. It is interesting and maybe worth doing some real studies.
But are we going to all give up our cell phones if it turns out that they cause problems with bees?
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Insightful)
I got three words for you: inverse square law.
If it takes putting a phone into the hive, then we're not really testing the effects of cellphones(as they are used IRL) on bees anymore.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Informative)
We've done that experiment thousands of times in this state for darn near a quarter century here. It's called a ... farm.
Its almost a stereotype that farmers on the perimeter of town lease a tiny plot of land for a tower, or lease the top of their grain silo, or lease the tippy top of the barn roof, etc.
Generally the lease payments are enough to maintain the structure and/or the driveway leading up to the structure, not so little as to barely buy a beer and not so much as for the farmer to retire. I have two relatives in the farming business, one in sheep (well, that sounds completely inappropriate) and the other in corn and somewhat in vegetables, I know what I'm talking about here.
Note that farmers in general and dairy farmers especially are very much tuned in (bad pun) to EMF and electromagnetic fields. First of all because its almost a stereotype that all their heavy electrical gear is in disrepair and they have to keep their wits about them or they'll get electrocuted, and secondly, dairy farmers attach metal/electrical milking machines to a part of the cow anatomy where very few female mammals, humans included, enjoy having even the smallest electrical current flow.
I suppose it depends a lot on where you live, but around here its "normal" for farms to have a couple hives, or to rent some hives during pollination season.
Given that base stations run 10 - 20 dB more power than a handheld, any electromagnetic effect would harm the bees/whatever about 10 - 20 dB worse.
Since the reported effects from the very low power handheld transmitter are terrible, then every time for the last quarter century, simply driving a pollination truck onto a farm that rents basestation space should result in all the bees dying like instantly. But they don't.
Also most "medium and up" farmers have some form of radio network. Think technology like CBs, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. Anyway, that RF source seems to have had no effect for at least 50+ years.
Hmm. I wonder if all of reality is wrong, or maybe, just maybe, the crackpot report is wrong.
lots of different kinds of RF (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of different kinds of RF, and whatever effects there may be are likely to be wavelength dependent. The kind of RF that's used for cell phones now didn't use to exist much in nature. CB radios use completely different frequencies. And given that the devices were placed in the hives, they were not "very low power"; the bees were directly next to the antenna. Any effect in the wild may be more subtle.
These experiments are not conclusive enough for any action yet, and there's always the possibility of fraud or error, but calling them "crackpot" is not warranted based on what they said and published.
Actually, it's your analysis and your blanket dismissal of the possibility of these kinds of effects that are "crackpot".
LoL at article... (Score:5, Interesting)
The latest one that he lost was in March. In a matter of days, all the bees died within the hive as if they had been gassed or poisoned. None of the bees attempted to remove the old bees as normally happens. The "full complement" of workers was there in a pile at the bottom of the hive--nothing had dispersed. There was no smell of disease. And there was plenty of non-rotted honey left. Few predators or scavengers to be found in the hive eating the honey: no yellow jackets, and all the hive beetles were dead. A few spiders. Very, very odd.
The previous one died in December/January. The previous year, there had been plenty of honey left. This was a very productive hive. We opened it up after noticing the eerie silence near the hive and that the bees were not egressing for cleaning flights. Pushing on the hive, it rocked with ease which normally doesn't happen because these things can weigh well over a hundred pounds when healthy. There was absolutely NOTHING left in this huge hive. No honey, no workers, no brood, nothing. No honey. No dead bees on the outside. A healthy hive had just disappeared during the middle of the winter.
I find a little conflict here. The service out there is kind of sucky, and I don't see how he could have lost three hives in the last year and none in prior years when probably nothing has changed with the cell service out there aside from maybe a beam direction change.
Re:LoL at article... (Score:5, Informative)
What likely happened here was war (beekeepers call it "robbing"). The hive you describe from March was the defender in an all out war with another hive, the other hive likely took heavy losses as well. The pile of dead contained bodies from both. That was the battlefield. The attacking hive may have also died completely during the war, which is why there was still honey in the victim hive.
The winter loss you describe is indicative of the attacking hive in a similar war. An attacker that didn't win. Or perhaps did, but didn't gain enough honey for the queen to survive the winter. For some reason they lost all their honey stores (This can happen if yet another hive robbed them, or if the queen kept laying too many workers for the stores to support for too long after the nectar flow stopped). After the hive eats all its stored honey, it turns on neighboring hives.
CCD looks similar to these losses, but both honey remains (until it's scavenged by others) AND there are no dead bees to be seen. Such that it looks as if a perfectly functional hive just up and left.
My two hives went to war last summer, and the carnage was unbelievable. Hundreds of thousands dead in a pile in front of the "victim" hive. I didn't know why they went to war at the time, but now I know that 70,000 bees can consume a massive store of honey pretty quickly if they have no work to do. And I've also learned that if 3 days don't go by without rain, flowers don't produce enough nectar for bees to have any work to do. (It was VERY rainy here last summer)
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but here's some food for thought:
If commercial agriculture relies on bees to pollinate commercial crops ... and if the cell phones are killing the bees ... what happens when there's no bees left?
We stand to lose a lot if we lose bees. Research into their health is important to our ability to grow food.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Interesting)
Several countries (most notably China) already use armies of human workers wandering around with pollination brushes in order to pollinate crops that used to be taken care of (for free) by bees.
This sort of thing falls squarely in the realm of "ecological services" provided by the various natural systems we humans are busily degrading or outright destroying.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Insightful)
Either this modest little proposal of yours is a case of an epically poor sense of the mechanics of satire, or you're actually serious about this. Forgive me if I assume that it's the latter.
Before you embark on the journey towards that lofty goal, you might want to do a bit of research into this historical social phenomenon called Indentured Servitude [wikipedia.org] and workhouses [wikipedia.org]. They were, after all, some of the means by which the US economy operated in its early days. (The other was slavery, but that meddler Lincoln made sure we'd never get that back.)
You know, Charles Dickens, the Methodist movement [wikipedia.org] and entire generations of the best and brightest in England, Europe and North America devoted their lives to ending this practice. If they knew you were proposing it again, they'd no doubt be rolling in their graves.
Shame on you for even considering this. Shame too on the moderator(s) who thought this was in any way insightful.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Insightful)
Orin Hatch tried that in Michigan... what was it called again... oh right "wellfare to work". You have to hold down a job earning a certain amount of money before you can get foodstamps. Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare... all that work and you still earn so little that you can't feed your kids without help...
That's not helping the economy (which is supposed to serve the population, not just the business OWNERS). And of course, it has obvious and logical side effects... when a single mother doesn't get to see her kid AT ALL, because she's working 16-hours a day to give him a roof and food, does it surprise you that he ends up shooting a classmate at the age of 7 ?
It's easy to say "where were the parents ?" apparently they were spending 4 hours a day on busses, to do 16 hours a day of work, and sleep 4 hours a day... for practically nothing.
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Thanks for spelling that out. We TRIED that in South Africa (except it was mineworkers, not plant polinators)... it didn't work [wikipedia.org]. Of course if you would LIKE your next president to come to power via an armed struggle, feel free not to lear
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>>We got really lucky - we didn't have a civil war (though it was close) - YET
>Fixed that for you
On a long enough timeframe the probability of any possible event occuring approaches one. In other words, yeah it's possible, and it WILL come - if you are prepared to wait long enough. Right now there is exactly ZERO evidence suggesting one in our lifetime.
>>, and we got one of the most wonderful and forgiving leaders in world history so we didn't get a destructive, vengeful time >>afterwar
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Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare
Then it wasn't structured correctly.
Personally, I'm mostly a libertarian. Paying welfare for people who could be working irks me something fierce.
Still, I don't want people starving on the streets or so desperate they turn to crime.
My first plot was simply to take welfare, and if you got a job reduce your benefits by 50% of what you earn. That way you always benefited. Then I learned a bit more about life and opportunity cost and such, so my plan has altered some. Especially with a low paying job 50% mi
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Welfare is intended for those who have no job. If you intend to pay people to work for you, thus creating jobs, then there are more people with jobs and fewer who need welfare. Cancelling welfare does not make job opportunities magically appear.
Note: Just passed Microeconomics CLEP, studying for Macroeconomics one.
There's opportunity costs involved with work - some people, for whatever reason, don't like working, do enjoy sitting on their ass watching TV.
So there are people out there who are perfectly willing to get welfare at $X, when they could be out working at $2X. They're comfortable that way.
Eliminate welfare, their options become $0 or $X while working. They find jobs, relatives to mooch off of, go somewhere else, something. You push th
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Prison labor in the current US isn't really the same as in the older days. In the old days, laws were passed just to get people into prisons and the forced labor netted someone a profit. Now it's mostly volunteer, generally is some remedial task the prison already needs done, and is offered as a reward for not fucking up. There are some businesses that contract out with states in order to help fund some of the prisons but it doens't offset the costs of the prisoner.
I'd say it's closer to the older days than you think. I would argue that plenty of laws are passed just to get people into prisons. It may not be blatant, but consider our prison population per capita and how many non-violet offenders we have incarcerated. However, I hope that is unrelated to our use of prison labor.
While yes, most prison labor is volunteer(as-in, they have a choice), but they are not just completing tasks that the prison or state need done. They are also getting paid. Though the pr
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No, America would have all the manpower needed, if we ended most welfare. Children 18 and under should be fed, as well as children 18 - ~25 who are attending college, and so should the elderly. Let's empty our prison cells, our ghetto projects, and everyplace else we are warehousing deadbeat do-nothing bums, and put them to work.
Yeah, the idea is HIGHLY unpopular - but I say that people who produce nothing, should consume nothing. All able bodied persons who are not otherwise gainfully employed can start pollinating the strawberries, peaches, apples, and all the other crops that we enjoy. Let me emphasize - ALL able bodied people. And, that will include a lot of people that we have classified as "handicapped". It doesn't take a mental giant to do a few hours of menial labor out in the field each week, nor does it take a lot of stamina.
Maybe we can reduce the number of tons of fat that Americans are carrying around with them at the same time!
You have a much higher probability of seeing pigs fly before your fantasies about America becoming a pack horde of farm pollinators ever happens.
The research should focus on communication wave patterns that Bess rely on and to see if disruption zones are happening with the RF waves; and if so how we can adjust our communication signal patterns to accomodate them. It's a far cheaper solution.
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And will you be paying them ? A fair wage ? When they aren't legally allowed to quit their jobs that is ALREADY slavery. Quite frankly most unfair-wage jobs pay worse than wellfare, or so little more that even the most BASIC profit/effort assesement have people choosing wellfare over them.
You can't blame them for that.
You want to solve the problem here ? The answer is not to take away wellfare and it sure as HELL isn't forced labour.
How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build
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How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build an offshore factory, it's illegal to import the products there produced back into the corporate host country.
Voila - end of offshoring WITHOUT removing the viability of local factories for big overseas markets.
Then what simply happens is that you get a seperate company to do it. A different company builds a factory in the cheap country, then starts importing the product. The in-country company ends up shuttering the factory because they can't compete.
Otherwise you're looking at tariffs and blockades, and those generally harm the country doing more than it does the foreign country; indeed it's worse all around.
Make labor law have REAL teeth. Set minimum wage to maximum welfare times 3. Declare that any business caught paying less than it, to anybody, ever for ANY job will immediately lose it's business license REGARDLESS OF ALL OTHER FACTORS and that INCLUDES if the workers are illegal immigrants. Same rule goes for safe working conditions etc.
Increasing minimum wage simply ensures that people who's labor is worth less than minimum wage don't ge
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See - this happens in almost every discussion on the web. Someone has to see the issue as a partisan issue. Instead of asking, "How can we fix the problem?" you choose to point your finger, and say, "Well, the problem is THEIR fault!" Blue state, red state, it doesn't matter. Far to many people are sitting on their asses, playing music and video games all day, on the taxpayer's dime, when the COULD find a job.
Oh - did I mention that I have two stepsons, and 3 sons, all of whom are legally adults? Of th
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Interesting)
Study, yes. Jumping to conclusion, no.
Somehow, I find it terribly hard to believe that cell phones are responsible for the GLOBAL decline in bee populations and bee productivity. The same problems are being witnessed in developed countries, as well as undeveloped.
If you were to do a search on my posts about cell phones, you would quickly learn that I don't much like them, and I am also suspicious of health hazards that are little understood at this time. But, anyone who is even trying to be rational will recognize that bees dying off in backwoods areas with little or no cell phone service can't be blamed on cell phones.
If cell phones were to blame, we would be seeing huge dye-offs in Florida, New Jersey, California -but states like Montana and Idaho would be virtually unaffected.
As far as I can determine, that is not the case at all.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you are correct. It's fairly likely that Colony Collapse is caused by feeding bees High Fructose Corn Syrup contaminated with hydroxymethylfurfural [acs.org]. Probably what happened was the phone uses a capacitance system to scan the buttons on the front. This scanning results in a high pitched sound that bees can probably hear and are probably annoyed by. Other things might be the phone smelled funny becuase a person had touched it, or the phone circuit board was treated with something toxic to bees. The only true test would be to put a sterile wire right in the hive and pump out 50W of power and see that nothing happens.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Insightful)
I was annoyed by the design of the test too (ignoring the obvious methodology flaws in the number of samples/etc.) Why did the inactive cell phones need to be dummies instead of just "off"? What if the bees are simply allergic to the batteries in the real cell phones? The test is obviously intended to examine the effects of the radio waves, since bees are not often in close proximity to cell phones themselves -- wouldn't a better test be to put in identical phones and simply disable the *radio* amplifier in one of the phones, so that the other conditions are as close to identical as practical? Or as you suggested, to simply pound the hives with radio sans any local electronics installation?
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you are correct. It's fairly likely that Colony Collapse is caused by feeding bees High Fructose Corn Syrup contaminated with hydroxymethylfurfural.
No, it isn't. Bees are dying en masse on Organic farms where the bees aren't being fed anything but minimally-environmentally-contaminated pollen as well.
The only true test would be to put a sterile wire right in the hive and pump out 50W of power and see that nothing happens.
That would be stupid. The only true test is to keep your control group in a faraday cage, because ambient EM spill from cellphone communications is otherwise washing over them all the time. However, the only way you could feasibly do this would be to keep the experiment small, effectively keeping the bees inside, which is also unnatural.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Informative)
As far as we know with other examples of non-ionizing radiation, there are virtually no effects, immediate, delayed, substantial or otherwise.
Even in the case of ionizing radiation, the effects *are* immediate. One might not notice the effects right away if they are mild, but the tissue damage happens when you're exposed, not some time later via radiation time-delay magic.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Insightful)
We're not going to lose bees, thank you evolution. There are plenty of hives that have survived CCD, and while it may take a few years for populations to fully recover, we can be confident that Darwin has left us with the bees that naturally resist whatever the cause of CCD turns out to bee.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Funny)
No, if the study proves repeatable, we just need to stop storing our cell phones inside beehives. The inverse square law will take care of the rest.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:5, Funny)
But are we going to all give up our cell phones if it turns out that they cause problems with bees?
No. We are going to end up fitting each of them with a little foil coat and hat though...
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I dunno if anyone else has posted this... but its one of the worst studies I've ever seen. Theyve even got a picture as part of the article showing how they failed to blind themselves, not to mention the data doesnt make sense, (means outside of the range reported..at least I think, its not clear). "Current Science" appears to be a terrible journal, there should be a separate word for that kind of journal so as not to confuse the general public.
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25may2010/1376.pdf [ias.ac.in]
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No, because the cell phone were dumping heat into the hive. Everyone already knows bees work better when heated up, at least up to a certain temperature.
I'm told by my farmer relatives that hives in the winter cannot be killed by anything above antarctic temperatures, but they CAN run out of food, at which point they promptly die. So you can feed them corn syrup, which kills them later rather than sooner. Or so I am told. You actually weigh the entire hive and graph it. Obviously you record the weight
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No doubt. That was my first response. Please, someone do this same experiment in different parts of the US and around the world.
A sad reality is that even if we proved the mobile phones are the cause, we would sooner die than give up our phones. On the other hand, if someone came up with a nice short-range, low-power strategy that utilized our old copper lines and power polls everywhere, we could reduce the amount of radiation quite a bit. The remaining problem would be service in the country areas, whi
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Four fields of bee hives, one with Faraday cages installed on each hive, one with nothing (control), one with cell phones on/in the box, and another with the phone 2m away. That'd generate the kind of data we're actually looking for wouldn't it?
If you set that up a hundred times, yes.
Individual hives can fail for any number of basically unpredictable reasons.
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Individual hives can fail for any number of basically unpredictable reasons.
Which is probably why he wrote "[f]our fields of bee hives," dontcha think?
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. All the bees in a single field could be impacted by a nearby external uncontrolled stimulus: anything from an early frost, drought, pesticide applications, diseases, mites, fungi, competing colonies of nearby bees, or even dirt on the shoes of the guy changing the cell phone batteries. You'd need a really large set of samples to figure out if there was even a measurable impact by using a Faraday cage. I seriously doubt that a hundred fields would provide enough samples.
Four samples would yield nothing more significant that the current article, which is another way of saying "worthless".
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Nope. All the bees in a single field could be impacted by a nearby external uncontrolled stimulus.
Now that was my first thought in regard to his experimental design. Why have the four conditions separated into four fields, much better to mix them up. But that's not what I was responding to. I was responding to someone talking about "individual hives" who concluded by telling us that "[f]our samples would yield nothing more significant that the current article."
I seriously doubt that a hundred fields wou
Don't ask don't tell (Score:5, Funny)
That'd generate the kind of data we're actually looking for wouldn't it?
Definitely not! I like my phone and mobile devices, so any empirical evidence which inconveniences me would have to be rationalised away in any case. I'm pretty confident the study would turn up nothing at all. It's almost axiomatic that what's good for me is good for the world. The research money would better be spent increasing coverage by erecting more transmission towers and the like.
And yeah, Honey is bad for your health.
I wouldn't mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
... if they banned cell phones. I made it through the first 35 years of life without one and I can make the rest of the way without one.
Re:I wouldn't mind... (Score:4, Funny)
Should I get off your lawn now, grandpa?
Re:I wouldn't mind... (Score:4, Funny)
Should I get off your lawn now, grandpa?
Only after you pollinate some of his flowers.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, but they also left them... (Score:5, Funny)
... on the loudest setting AND vibrate mode! :)
Just kidding,
Paul B.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also the whole "inverse square law" thing. Power drops off with the square of distance. So if something is outputting 3 watts right at the transmitter, you are not receiving 3 watts when you are 100 feet away. Even if the energy from mobile devices is what has an impact, you need to test it in the levels yo actually see in the real world. As an example: My phone currently shows 4 bars, which is the max for the model (Curve 8330). When I ask it how powerful the signal it is getting, it says -80dBm. That is 10 picowatts, or 0.00000000001 watts. The maximum output for a class 1 mobile phone is 33dBm, which is 2 watts. I should note this is a strong signal. The phone works fine with signals less than -90dBm.
So, when you are talking about being right next to the transmitter, as opposed to a normal distance away, you are talking many MANY orders of magnitude of signal difference. The signal of cell towers is extremely weak at the average location in the city (and weaker still in the country). They work with low signal strength and low SNR. That's the reason they work with low power devices.
Even if the physical presence of the phone doesn't fuck with the results, the power very well could. If they want to test this properly it would require multiple hives, and transmitters that bathed the area in the kind of energy you'd see from the actual network.
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Wouldn't matter. Individual bees are unimportant. Their society is structured much like ants in that the individual worker matters little. After all, a bee kills itself to attack a predator. When they sting, their stinger becomes embedded in what they attack, and it results in their death.
So if a few bees got disoriented and couldn't make it home, wouldn't do anything to the colony. Bees don't make it home all the time. They die for various reasons (they are food for a number of creatures). It would have to
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Not really. Both hives had phones in them. In one of the hives, the phones were powered on for two, 15 minutes periods per day. In the hive with the active phone, the bees stopped producing honey and there was a "dramatic" decline in the bee population for that hive. That seems like something, not nothing and seems like it'd be worth further study. This is the first step. If nothing had happened, they could dicard the thesis, but something did happen. Maybe the next step is hive near cell towers and hives n
Re:Wait, what? - The next step (Score:2, Informative)
The next step is to run more tests with more hives, and more test groups (with - as suggested elsewhere in the discussion - graduated exposure levels)
Not to run around like a headless chook claiming the preliminary test actually means anything.
1. Do limited unscientific test.
2. Profit!
3. ???
Temperature Alone could be the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
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How much additional heat would the 15-minute per day cell phone sessions plus the phone being in "Stand-By" 24/7 produce in the hive? My guess is it might increase the temperature a couple of degrees.
Bugger all.
Does talking on the phone for 15mins heat your head up by a couple of degrees?
No.
How often do you stick your phone inside your head while you talk? Have you never used your phone as a hand-warmer in winter? I have. If I can feel the warmth, it must be more than a couple of degrees F (enough to screw with the very temperature sensitive bees).
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
You both are wrong:
1. they actually used 4 hives
2. the control group had phone dummies installed. So the "proximity effect" was controlled.
It is unfortunate to see that the paper -- http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25may2010/1376.pdf [ias.ac.in] -- does not include a statistical test to evaluate that the results are due to chance, but it seems significant ... anyone care to do a ANOVA?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
4 WHOLE hives you say? Wow.. just wow.
I'm a beekeeper. Any beekeeper knows that hive productivity and queen laying varies quite a bit. Why? Queens aren't all the same, and the genetics obviously varies. Some queens lay more than other queens. As queens get older, they start to lay less eggs (and eventually the workers give her the boot and make a new queen). The queen will produce all the workers, and her genetics combined with the genetics of the drones she mated with will determine the behavior of the workers produced. There's probably a dozen other factors at work as well.
The idea that you can take only 4 hives, average the results, and expect any kind of meaningful answer out of that is ridiculous. If they did this with 40 hives I might start listening. But 4? Beyond stupid.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
As a bee that was part of the "mobile" hive (and I resent the assumption that we were not "mobile" before this unfortunate test), I can attest that the researchers got what they were looking for. Of course we're not going to linger around the hive, nor will the queen lay eggs, as long as they keep calling us with some mobile phone company tag line. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yeah yeah, how about I sting your lab coated ass?
It's one thing to have a periodic interruption from our "keeper" even though he has a horrible smoking problem. But jeez, phone calls at 3am from a drunk whiner complaining about his love life and apologizing ... is that part of your thesis? Of course the phone's presence will impact us, dumbass.
Oh, and the text messsages: seriously not funny. Just stop.
No no. (Score:4, Funny)
There were millions of bees. The results are highly significant.
Clearly we are seeing a great contribution to science.
Re:No no. (Score:5, Funny)
I say we ban cell phones from bee-hives immediately - let them use old fashioned land lines instead
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly, maybe one queen had poor leadership.
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Easy to fix (Score:5, Funny)
Sample size (Score:2)
It sounds like a very possible cause thing to investigate, but it would have been nice if there were more than just two hives involved in the experiment. I hope a follow-on experiment is done with more hives.
It will be very interesting if cell phones and bees come into conflict. Considering all the jack-assery that I've seen associated with cell phones, there's a part of me that would love to see then banned.
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Yes, all of that is true.
But when have we ever let things like that trump small technological conveniences?
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We all would. That is why Earth is doomed.
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Considering all the jack-assery that I've seen associated with cell phones, there's a part of me that would love to see then banned.
I'm posting as AC because I already modded in this thread. I'm also feeling cranky because I have to go to work tomorrow so I'll take this to the ridiculous extreme.
I see comments like this from time to time and I'm not going to jump on DOD but instead depersonalize it. Whenever someone makes a comment about cell phones being banned, I would ask them to lead by example. Get rid of their phone and ask everyone you're with to turn theirs off or leave them at home (wife/husband/sig other/kids/parents/friends/w
two hives (Score:5, Insightful)
that's a sample size that even andrew wakefield would have considered ridiculous
Re: (Score:2)
This is actually a very serieus problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I haven't raised bees in a while, but I remember "mites" being the rea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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I haven't raised bees in a while, but I remember "mites" being the really big problem affecting most hives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor [wikipedia.org])
And because mites are smaller, cell phone radiation must have an even greater effect on them. Therefore, cell phones kill mites at a greater rate than bees, therefore cell phones save bees!!
Save the bees! Build more cell towers!
Re: (Score:2)
It seems to me if "electro-smog" was the problem, the problem would be seen decreasing with increasing range of cell towers. In my neck of the woods I can literally ride my bicycle out of cell phone range, so it shouldn't be too hard to find apiarists in low EMF locations to compare with apiarists in high EMF areas for comparison.
Re:This is actually a very serieus problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Soo (Score:2)
Inverse-square law of radiation says no (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but if you have to place the cell phone right in the hive there's no way a hive more than five feet away from a cell phone 24x7 is going to be impacted by this.
Perhaps the bees just got really into texting to the exclusion of pollen gathering.
Re:Inverse-square law of radiation says no (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now, they kept trying to text the other hive and when they didn't get a response, the first hive realized that they weren't BFF and got depressed and stopped collecting pollen, making honey and doing the nasty with the queen...
Sheldon
CCD Overblown (Score:2, Interesting)
Waitaminute... I thought I read in Scientific American or somesuch that the recent CCD scare was actually just a surge in reporting in the media, not an actual dramatic increase in rates. Furthermore, most of the real cases were attributed to more mundane causes pesticides or the stress of a colony being moved...
Someone back this poor AC up with a link.
should have used Googles Android (Score:4, Funny)
Re:should have used Googles Android (Score:4, Funny)
But then they would all be smashed on somebody's windshield..
This crap gives science a bad reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, seriously.
And the bloody media come up with crap like "Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee" based on it.
"Study says", "scientists say". It's tealeaf reading. Crystal ball gazing. Science is nothing more than a marketing term to convince people to buy whatever they're selling.
We need a term to describe things which appear to be science but in fact which are not.
Re:This crap gives science a bad reputation (Score:5, Informative)
We need a term to describe things which appear to be science but in fact which are not.
Um... pseudoscience?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
as a scientist I take offense (Score:3, Interesting)
Science is a method for obtaining data, testing hypotheses, and reporting results. The results of science, like virtually anything else,
It doesn't explain losses at remote apiaries... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was talking to a fellow beekeeper on Quadra Island [wikipedia.org], which is in a very rural part of the province, with a population of about 2000 people. This beekeeper lost 470 hives out of 500 this year.
There aren't many people, and cellphone service is poor... I doubt there are many phones there.
I'm skeptical until a lot more research is done.
Re:It doesn't explain losses at remote apiaries... (Score:5, Informative)
I just came back from a stay at a bed & breakfast in rural Virginia, where the innkeeper's husband also happens to keep 10 hives of bees on the property - very poor cellphone service in the whole area, 1 bar of EDGE reception, if even that much. He lost 8 of the 10 hives to apparent Colony Collapse a few years ago, but completely back to normal now.
Actual Apiarist/beekeeper here. Blame GMO'd pollen (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey guys. Here's the skinny of it all. Posting ANONYMOUS because it isn't worth the libel and slander of any effort against me to waste my time any more of whom I've to blame
I am an active part-time Apiarist. Been that way ever since a kid, because I'm poor and insects are cheap fun that give me a God-complex of love over helping the little stingy creatures in my hands. From prior ventures in Construction I've accumulated enough window-screen and plastic-polymer sun-screen that I was able to cover my entire backyard into three cube sections each with two colonies in them. In the section with the plastic-polymer sun-screen that gives absolutely no breeze and complete isolation from the environment, I reared two colonies of bees on natural heirloom flowering plants and used air-conditioners to keep the moisture levels steady and supplemented artificial lighting to keep the nectar flowing through more seasons. In the other window-screen enclosure, I planted your Home Depot variety of GMO'd flowers and such that produced plenty of nectar just they are written GMO'd on them. If you ever visit a garden Nursery to buy your flowers, much of the plants being sold today no longer have butterflies and bees swarming them because they've been GMO'd to the point that their odor and nectar is unappealing or poisonous. In the 3rd enclosure, it is completely cut-off from all flowering plants of any kind and the colony is reared on a sugar-cane solution I've developed myself and all the time while aerial-spraying the bees with a Titanium Oxide solution that is apparent as an atmosphere conditioner that I encountered in Los Angeles County.
You wouldn't believe what the results are.
The results of my Bees under House-arrest is that the bees that consume Homo Depot potted-plants' pollen and nectar in the open-atmosphere window-screen enclosure proved that the bees are dying from diseases encountered through seriously week Immune Systems all because the GMO'd pollen and nectar physically hurts them; what kills them most is Fungal Infections, no mites in any of my bees because they are under House Arrest in each of their caged cubicles. The next enclosure that is closed-circulation in a Sun-screen plastic-polymer tent is they are thriving like any colony should, rougly 40k bees in the towers. The last enclosure, the one where the bees were again closed-off from the atmosphere like the other ones and fed on a reliable solution of my own making, yet aerial-sprayed with Titanium Oxide, they all encountered almost the same kinds of Fungal Infections as the open-atmosphere bees that were only allowed Homo Depot GMO'd plants.
That's all there was to it, fellas. The contracts to the Aerial Spraying over Los Angeles is similarly available here as cloud_seeding_draft_mnd_final.pdf [anonymouse.org].
It's bad enough that all the CORN Pollen of GMO's plants has killed all the Monarch Butterflies. You'ld think you all would take a hint that Bees aren't the only insects dying.
It's costed me 4 dead colonies, over $2k of actual materials and 5 months of electricity for the test sites not including rent if were done on another premise, and all I got were obvious results that didn't have any tests to do with cell phone radiation. I would be more concerned with Cell-phone TOWERS and what effects they could have because those frequencies are resonating at frequencies of water that all life forms around them might be affected by. I've heard stories about Army communications officers and technicians, as well as ARRL HAM-licensees, getting all kinds of diminished Immune Systems and cancers from working over 5 hours a day in constant contact with these energy fields.
No effect on bees (Score:3, Insightful)
GSM and 3G signals should not have any effect of bees. As the waves are too big to have any effect of them. Wavelength of 900Mhz (and 850Mhz) is about 30 cm. It is slightly less at 1800Mhz and 1900Mhz.
In fact, the waves are bigger then bee in size in most cases.
This study needs to repeated few more times before any results can come from it.
Re:No effect on bees (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
This study needs to repeated few more times before any results can come from it.
That's probably why they only used two hives. Gotta make a living, you know!
Bluetooth! Wait - no! (Score:2)
Why is slashdot accepting stories from Telegraph?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you no standard? It's a retarded newspaper that prints nothing but idiocy.
Christ! What's next on slashdot? Healthy eating research article from Burger King's site? That only features stuff from their menu?
These must be the same Indian rocket scientists... (Score:2)
... who verified that humans can, in fact, engage in photosynthesis [randi.org].
As a Beekeeper... (Score:5, Informative)
No kidding (Score:3, Informative)
I think what people need to understand is that yes, CCD is a real, serious thing. However that doesn't mean that the first crackpot theory that comes along is right.
This is just more of the general anti-radiation paranoia that has been going on for, well, since we knew what radiation was. Another part of that would be humans and power lines. There was a bunch of paranoia that living near high voltage power lines would cause problems in kids because of the radiation. Now never mind that this is extremely lon
They've already found the cause (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php?campaign=th_rss_science [treehugger.com]
Then again... (Score:5, Informative)
Did anyone else read the OTHER article in the same paper that totally debunks the theory?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/iandouglas/100005223/mobile-phones-and-bees-shoddy-research-helps-no-one/ [telegraph.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yeah! I just thought the same!
How big is the chance that the oposite observation would have been the case?!
Similarly: I just made an controled experiment using a coin. Me and my 1 year younger friend got each a coin and threw it up. We agreed that head would win. He got tail, me head. So now we know, older people win when playing Head or Tails.
Still wonder to which news site to post this...
Re:Don't know about bees, but certainly this shows (Score:4, Informative)