Tinfoil Hats for Bees!
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.16.07
TreeHugger has discussed EMF before and even had some April Fools fun with it. We have also discussed the baffling loss of honey bees in America and now in the UK and Europe.Some think they are related; the theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Apparently "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. Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."
Given that CCD started in America which is a lot less dense than Europe, with lower cell phone use and where many aviaries probably don't even have cell phone coverage, and that the article continues with "blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives." We are not making little tinfoil hats for bees yet. Strange stuff from the ::Independent
Read also the ::Register
UPDATE: The American CCD working group says in this pdf "The distribution of both affected and non-affected CCD apiaries does not make this a likely cause. Also cell phone service is not available in some areas where affected commercial apiaries are located in the west. For this reason, it is currently not a top priority."
But I want to see bees in tiny tinfoil hats! (But only if it is recycled tinfoil!)
On a serious note, I've heard some rumblings of GM crops being a possibld cause of CCD. There was another limited study that looked at the effect of insect resistant GM crops on bees and it was not positive. Does anyone have any news on that front?
LA: according to the same working paper that discounted cell phones:
GMO crops: Some GMO crops, specifically Bt Corn have been suggested as a potential cause of CCD. While this possibility has not been ruled out, CCD symptoms do not fit what would be expected in Bt affected organisms. For this reason GMO crops are not a “top” priority at the moment.
GMOs wouldn't seem a likely cause as they're very limited in Europe.
the only tests I've seen cited (on pages pushing this theory) about GMO corn say that the Bt doesn't hurt the bees itself. When you combine Bt with a parasite the bees are hurt affected than they would normally be.
Also, the study used several more times Bt pollen than one would find in nature.
So, it's not GMO's. not cell phones.
The hardest pars of this is since the bees don't come back there's no way to preform a colony "autopsy" and look for infection or something.
The GMO study is below:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,473166,00.html
Also, my dad worked in the cell/mobile phone industry since its beginning and I asked him about this. According to him, the older analog phones emitted much more radiation than the newer digital phones (longer battery life, less power consumption, etc..). So he doesn't think that it could be the cause. But then the bees might be overly sensitive to the radiation being emitted. In addition, the towers don't cover extremely large areas but providers have been pushing for expanded nationwide coverage (rural areas near farms?) to gain a larger customer base in the last few years
Just my 2 cents.
FUD and speculation.
I tend to believe more that this is a GMO issue than a cell phone issue due to the migration of the problem.
Europe has had pervasive cell phone use for years. When I lived there in 96-97 everyone had a cell phone. The dramatic jump in cell phone use in the states has only occurred in the past 5 years.
Thus, if it was a cell phone issue it would have started there and then migrated here, not the other way around.
We in the U.S. however, have been using GMO's for much longer and that is something that can also be transferred unwittingly or unwillingly to another continent (think contaminated seed sold to foreign farmers, migratory bird droppings, who knows what else). It's why I'm in favor of getting rid of GMO's entirely. They are never tested thoroughly enough and once they’re "out there" they are "out there" and we consistently play catch up assessing the environmental damage they cause.
I'd like to know what newly approved GMO seeds were planted at the time this phenomenon began to see if there is a correlation.
I'd also like to know what else could be causing the problem.
I want more information about exactly when this happened and more information about bees in general.
E.g. #1
Are bees sensitive to a rise in temperature? Did most of them disappear during last summer’s heat wave?
E.g. #2
What about stress\fatigue? I read a lengthy article on this in the New York Times and was surprised to learn that bees are now trucked across the country to pollinate at various farms rather than staying put at one farm as we had when I was growing up. Coming from an "old fashioned farm", it just seems odd to do this. Thus, in addition to cross pollinating GMO crops with regular crops as they most certainly must be doing, can the stress of being moved around so much be wearing on them? Sounds silly, but... how little we know about nature.
Isn't global warming the issue? Aren't most species affected by it?
Einstein said that once the Bees go away, humanity has about four years before it’s wiped out. The chains of life will break down and a domino affect of biological destruction will ensue. What do you think of that?