A Real Global Catastrophy

[lazs2]

good.. give the hand wringers something to worry about other than than "man made global warming"

that one was getting kind of stale anyway.

lazs

[bozon]

As with all popular articles, you can't understand anything about the weight of evidence from that link.

If radiation from cellular phones is to blame, it should be easy to verify in a controlled experiment. I wouldn't put any money betting on this.

Bozon

[Eagler]

I hope it is all just an exaggeration ... if it isn't, say hello to MUCH higher food prices

[AquaShrimp]

I dont think major grain crops are pollinized by insects.  Thats mostly wind pollination.

However most flowering food crops are pollinized by insects (tomatoes, squash, fruits).

Ironically, honey bees, which have become our major insect pollinators, are an introduced species.  There were no honey bees in the Americas before the europeans arrived.

[Shuffler]

Thought the basic setup of cell towers was gleened from the cell structure of behives.... so your saying they can use cells and we can't ??

[Charon]

The cellphones are giving the bees brain cancer, I bet.

Charon

[BBBB]

Originally posted by tedrbr
Well.  The bees are kinda important if you and a lot of others want to keep eating affordable foodstuffs in the future.

As to the powder coated yellow on your car?  You live in an area with pine trees (or maybe a coal fired plant?) --- because it sounds like pollen from pine trees (or sulfer from a plant), which don't depend on bees.  Many pollens don't, dependent on the wind and such instead (pines being a big one).

UGH..my post was edited. Must have been a bee lover. Screw the bees. (Is that better?) You guys are going a bit over board on these edit things.

I live in Ga and we do have a ton of pine trees here. My car was yellow. I mean you could see some paint under it, but it was mostly yellow. I washed it every other day but after four days I said screw it and just let it stay yellow.
 But I also see a large number of bumble bees here too. More so than last year. I mean the sky was swarming with them until it got cold again. Cell phones get blamed for everything. Pearl Harbor was because of cell phones.


-Sp0t

[oboe]

Originally posted by bozon
As with all popular articles, you can't understand anything about the weight of evidence from that link.

If radiation from cellular phones is to blame, it should be easy to verify in a controlled experiment. I wouldn't put any money betting on this.

Bozon

Apparently a limited study was done at Koblenz-Landau University in Germany, and it found mobile phones were placed next to hives, bees refused to return to them.
Cellphone radiation implicated in CCD

Still not enough information about the study to suit me, and use of the word "refused" implies free will - that the bees chose not to return to their hives.  It may be the case they were unable to return to them.

I think tedrbr was referring to a different bee problem - if the bees are found dead in and around the hive its not the same problem as CCD (colony collapse disorder is what their calling it).    I might be wrong about that though.   At any rate it's not hard to imagine that bees might have to deal with more than one stressor in their lives at the same time.

Einstein said if we lose all the bees we've got 4 years left to live.   How's that for dramatic?    Beats a small rise in sea levels over 50 years, for sure.
With the media's infatuation with disaster science in mind, we'll probably be hearing a lot more about this and less about global warming, until the next superstorm.

Hope to see alot more info come out about this.   Another thing that was mentioned as a possible cause was genetically modified corn pollen.   Cellphone radiation confusing the bees' homing ability seems to make the most sense to me at this point.

[Seagoon]

Actually, despite the Sci-Fi scenarios being generated by this (how about this one; we train apes to pollinate flowers with Q-tips, the apes become more intelligent and develop a rudimentary language, then an Ape worker rebellion starts, and pretty soon they've taken over the planet...) The problem of CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) is very real and a lot of money is now starting to be thrown at the problem and it's even being discussed by the Federal Gov't ( for instance: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/agriculture_dem/pr_032907_HOAbees.html )

The thing that would seem to argue against a cell-phone cause is that the "syndrome" suddenly appeared in late 2006 long after Cell Towers had become commonplace throughout the United States and Europe. The sudden catastrophic decrease in Bee Populations would seem to argue more for either a disease or a parasite. Silly as it sounds, bio-warfare would actually seem to be a more plausible explanation than cell towers.

Who knows though, these wouldn't be the first workers to be made non-productive by cell phone conversations.

- SEAGOON

[Engine]

I pity those people in this thread who don't feel a declining world bee population is a serious problem.

[oboe]

Agreed Seagoon and Engine.    I don't mean to belittle the seriousness of either global warming (err climate change) or CCD.    I do mean to belittle the mass media and its short attention span and sensational yet superficial treatment of possibily very serious problems.     There is no argument that massive numbers of bees are dying.    And few people realize the importance of bees in pollenating crops and fruit trees.

The thing that doesn't make sense to me about a pathogen is that the colonies seem abandoned - despite what tedrbr said, I have heard there are no dead bees around the colonies that have collapsed - they are just gone.    That makes me suspect something interfering with their homing ability.

Humanity is looking more and more to me like the proverbial bull in the china shop.

[Maverick]

I don't understand why bees would suddenly be dying over cell phone emissions when for decades there have been far higher power emissions from radio, TV and other microwave transmitters.

[AquaShrimp]

Frequency of the transmissions.

[Bluedog]

Originally posted by Maverick
I don't understand why bees would suddenly be dying over cell phone emissions when for decades there have been far higher power emissions from radio, TV and other microwave transmitters.

There are a lot more cell phones around than there are radio and TV transmitters, radars etc.
For all we know, emmissions from these objects have been causing dramas for decades, but not on such a scale as to make it immediately apparent.

[Seagoon]

From a good article on the phonomenon in Cosmos:

Since October 2006, 35 per cent or more of the United States' population of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) - billions of individual bees - simply flew from their hive homes and disappeared. (Source: Mystery of the dying bees  

Ok so did Cell Phones reach some sort of critical mass worldwide in late 2006 or did they start using a new frequency or something of that sort?

- SEAGOON