Making a beeline to nowhere?

[paigetheoracle]

In recent years bee numbers have started to decline rapidly in Scotland. Could mobile telephone masts be bringing this about, through the mechanism of microwave radiation scrambling the homing instinct apparatus within the bees brain as such? Pigeons are known to navigate, using the Earths magnetism - could bees be doing the same thing only over smaller distances?

 

In the Uk this has only been commented on in Scotland, so has the same phenomena been noticed elsewhere in the world and have any other theories been brought forward to explain it?

[Hill]

In recent years bee numbers have started to decline rapidly in Scotland. Could mobile telephone masts be bringing this about, through the mechanism of microwave radiation scrambling the homing instinct apparatus within the bees brain as such? Pigeons are known to navigate, using the Earths magnetism - could bees be doing the same thing only over smaller distances?

 

In the Uk this has only been commented on in Scotland, so has the same phenomena been noticed elsewhere in the world and have any other theories been brought forward to explain it?

 

From July 28, 2007 SCIENCE NEWS

 

Not-So-Elementary Bee Mystery

Detectives sift clues in the case of the missing insects

Not-So-Elementary Bee Mystery: Science News Online, July 28, 2007

This article has a good summary of attempts to solve the mystery of the disappearing honeybees. Concerning cell phones, towers and the possible reversal of the Earth's magnetic field comes this quote:

The most infamous [suspect], so far, may be cell phones, described in the

British newspaper The Independent in mid-April under the headline

"Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?" The story referred to a

"limited study" at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany

reporting that "bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile

phones are placed nearby."

 

Pettis wondered why, if this were true, he was having such a hard

time getting phone reception when visiting afflicted hives in rural

areas. But what deflated this hypothesis most dramatically were the

German researchers themselves, who denied that their work had

anything to do with colony-collapse disorder. "None of us ever wanted

to do research on CCD," says Stefan Kimmel, a graduate student and

coauthor of one of the phone-bee studies.

 

The researchers hadn't even used what Americans would call a cell

phone but were experimenting instead with the base of a cordless

phone. They were developing a setup to test for effects of

electromagnetic radiation on honeybees, and for a source of

electromagnetic waves had placed the phone's base unit inside a hive.

 

It was hardly a realistic test. Evans adds that the bees in the

German group's experiment "may have just been offended by having this

phone [in their hive]." For the time being, he says, the possible

effects of electromagnetic fields on bees have moved down the list of

CCD culprits. So has the suggestion that bees are losing their

ability to navigate back to their hives because Earth is starting to

reverse its magnetic field. Evans asks why that would upset U.S. bees

more dramatically than it would bees in other nations, where CCD

reports have not been as widespread.

[Turtle]

In recent years bee numbers have started to decline rapidly in Scotland. Could mobile telephone masts be bringing this about, through the mechanism of microwave radiation scrambling the homing instinct apparatus within the bees brain as such? Pigeons are known to navigate, using the Earths magnetism - could bees be doing the same thing only over smaller distances?

 

In the Uk this has only been commented on in Scotland, so has the same phenomena been noticed elsewhere in the world and have any other theories been brought forward to explain it?

 

US has a problem, and plenty of theories posited to explain it. Here's a thread on the topic with plenty of links. >> http://hypography.com/forums/news-brief/10911-honey-bees-disappearing-8.html?highlight=disappearing+bees

 

I note that the last I heard is that this is only a problem with commercially kept bees, not wild bees, and that biologic parasites are to blame & not cell phones/towers. :) :hihi: