The Independent reports on a truly frightening prospect. The collapse of honeybee colonies may be related to the use of mobile phones. The way the article is laid out makes it hard to excerpt to get the point across. This is the best snip.
German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.
The problem is characterized here:
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London’s biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
Should we be concerned?
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.
Mobile phones have been around for a while, so I don’t know why they would suddenly cause the collapse of bee colonies. Perhaps there are other explanations. But we better figure it out. And soon.
I have been listening to several long programs on the radio about the bee problem including one last night. One thing that was brought up was a new pesticide that was nicotine based and just used in the last 5 years.
Also it was pointed out that there are quite a number of researchers working on this, thanks largely due to the congressional hearing and attention to it.
I think it is a serious problem that requires even more attention and quickly, since our food supply is at stake…Almond growers in Ca. are in a tizzy and expecting low crops this year as they cannot get nearly enough bees for their fields.
I just found this link for the radio report I heard on Friday night Link here, in particular this paragraph reg. pesticides in interview with John Chapple, Chairman,
London Beekeepers Association, London, England.:
Why this year though? That is what struck me. It wasn’t like the bee growers all got cell coverage this year and the effect occurred.
It could be something to look into, but there has to be a reason why this year things started collapsing. Perhaps it’s a combination of triggers with the cell phones just playing a part.
This anonymous comment appeared last week, attached to a long report of the weather-related crop losses stretching from Kansas to the Carolinas and southwards. “Massive crop damage around the South,” an article linked by a blog I sometimes follow, was particularly relevant reading to me b/c I was in Asheville on the blustery Good Friday that saw the beginning of this cold snap.
I’d not heard of the disappearance of honey bees until this comment, now described in the story in the Independent UK. Hope biologists make progress in discovering the cause.
I’ll be going down to an oxbow lake on the lower white river in a bit, there are lots of blooms and today it should be warm enough to see lots of bees, I hope. I’ll report later on what I observed.
I’m very interested in hearing individual stories. Where I live, we’re still waiting for spring and blooms and the bees (I hope).
Where is my tinfoil hat!
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
Not many years ago em frequencies in this range were impossible to generate now even the most remote places are saturated.
Theory number two is GM foods and the weakening of the bee intestines.
Had a really nice day yesterday with the horses.
Before anyone panics, let me lay out a few things, I do this stuff for a living as an entomologist.
Honey bees are not native to the US. There are a ton of native insects that pollinate in addition to other organisms. Additionally, I’m pretty sure most grasses rely on wind for pollination, and that makes up most of our food crops.
There’s been some reports of genetically modified crops causing bee kills in Europe, when doses of pollen from those crops are off the scale. I think these valid scientific reports are getting echoed around the ‘net and coming back at us via these mysterious missing bee reports.
Several years back bee mites all but wiped out feral bees, and I’m thinking that’s why killer bees haven’t made it very far north. I personally watched hives in N. Florida get wiped by mites in less than 3 weeks. Bee keepers would put miniature pest strips in hives to keep the mites out.
My brother recently had a swarm removed from his house and I had a chance to chat up the guy called to remove it. He was from the same company our county agency refers people to. He says they are getting regular calls twice a year to remove bees, so that’s natural bee cycle in evidence, recovered from the mites. Until we see that stop I don’t see a threat. I have some irons in the fire concerning bees and I’ll let you know what I find out.
It turns out that speculation that we heard about many years ago about cell phones possibly harming people has not entirely gone away, as I had thought. The Independent article notes:
starving to death is really going to suck.
so it goes.
Mobile phones have been around for a while, so I don’t know why they would suddenly cause the collapse of bee colonies.
What changed in just the last couple of years was cell phones switching from an analog pulse to a digital transmission. No one knows how bees communicate or how they find their way back to their hives. The newer digital transmissions may be messing with their signals. I also don’t think cell phones reached mass use until the last year or so. Now even children have them.
The bee farmers here in eastern NC seems to be okay. But, then the population is sparse and there are a lot of cell phone “dead zones.”
It’s an alarming situation and possibly more imminently dangerous than climate change…
Yes –
That would be a very good approach – to map the distribution of these CCDs against various possible causes. And dead zones would be a good anti-canary in the mine shaft, wouldn’t it?
FYI – there is an industry out there that uses ArcGIS for plotting data onto maps, and it is a very solid way to look at this.
If dead zones coincide with healthy bee colonies, that would cinch it, in my book. BUT —
It is my guess that it is something else (gut feeling only). Whatever, though, one would think we may not have a lot of time.
Yet, as noted by Bugboy here, about the “natural bee cycle in evidence,” things happen periodically to the bee population, and they keep coming back. Maybe it is like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, where many are killed, but the few that survive are better adapted and repopulate the world with hardier bees. This could get really interesting…
. . . . TD