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.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:2, Informative)
I agree. One study involving 2 hives does not conclusively prove causality.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is actually a very serieus problem. (Score:3, Informative)
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])
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.
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: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?
As a Beekeeper... (Score:5, Informative)
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. ???
Re:Don't know about bees, but certainly this shows (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:2, Informative)
It is probably worth pointing out that lots of grains self pollinate, so the threat is more to food variety than it is to food supply.
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]
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 long, non-ionizing waves, no people were sure it caused cancer and all kinds of other problems.
Well, studies were done. I am probably a data point in one of those studies since as a kid, I grew up in a house near high voltage distribution lines. We now have many decades of information and guess what? They don't cause any problems. The kids who lived under them, who are now adults, don't show any difference in cancer rates or anything else from the general population.
This is the same shit, different field. Bees start dying for some reason that nobody understands so the anti-radiation nuts go "Oh my god it has to be cellphones! All that radiation is killing the bees!!" No proof, just wild speculation.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
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 be something that had a much wider effect to kill colonies (especially multiple ones).
Also, one of the consequences of the square part of the inverse square law is that power drops very quickly at first. If you look at a graph of the general function (f(x) = 1/x^2) you notice that is plummets very quickly then goes around a bend and levels off. This means that the difference between 5 inches away from a transmitter and 5 feet is much larger than the difference between 50 and 100 feet.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:3, Informative)
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]
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:2, Informative)
Prison labor is already huge in the USA and elsewhere, I think we have workhouses by another name.
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: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.
Re:Independent studies warranted (Score:3, Informative)
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 on an average spring as the minimum and if the hive weight graph approaches its "lowest point ever" in january instead of the usual april or whatever, then you start worrying, and break out the corn syrup...
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".
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)