Mobiles back in the frame as bee killers Strapping a pair of mobile phones to the side of a bee hive can lead to a dramatic decline in honey and bee production, researchers have claimed. Published in Current Science, the research (pdf) compared the performance of hives exposed to cell phones with those kept radio-free. According to the researchers the phone use led …
The controls either had dummy phones or no phones. A timer controlled noise-maker would have been better.
Bee #1 " Fuck me. It's that funny noise again!"
Bee #2 "I know. It went of this morning when I left the hive, and I forgot what I went out to get."
Bee #3 "If it doesn't stop soon, I'm going on strike."
I keep bees and have had as many as eight hives. Any beek will tell you that the performance of hives can vary widely depending on he origin and age of the queen. Last years duff hive can be next years front runner.
It's not clear if the hives had fresh queens from the same source or not, but even then, it's unlikely that the queens would be genetically identical...
An interesting experiment, but really, you'd have to use a lot more hives before it was significant.
Also worth reading http://www.newscientist.com/special/living-in-denial to get a feel for how to recognise bad or deliberately deceptive 'research'. In this case it sure looks like there are ties to the wider world of alarmist denialism.
I'd really appreciate it if TheReg added a MASSIVE link to that page on every Orlowski post, the man that demonstrated the link between SCO's fraudulent Linux lawsuit and Global Warming ;)
... if you're fascinated with abandoning any desire to follow scientific method.
If you actually want to prove anything here you'd need to get either a vast number of hives, some with no phones, some with duds, some that play the ringtones but output no EM, and some with various phones strapped to them. Especially with bees, comparing a couple of hives and then extrapolating that is madness - there's so many factors that could go on here, one being the question of whether the researchers were disturbing the hives whilst looking at what happened when the phone rang & whether they were disturbing the controls at the same times and another just the sheer variability of conditions outdoors.
By the time that the powers that be finally get round to spending the money to do proper research, and the scientists actually find the problem, the bees will have long gone, alas.
I did not see a single honey bee last year, and have not seen one this year either. Natural hives in the area (near Edinburgh) have gone, and my father's six hives have all died too.
Too little, far too late. We blew it. Welcome to the end days.
As Steve Crook has pointed out, it is a basic truth of beekeeping that two hives side by side behave totally differently.
Most Queens mate with 10 plus random drones, 30 feet up in the air, miles away from the hives ( Whee!). So their genetics are always different and always unknown unless you do some weird Instrumental Insemination.
To do a decent piece of science on bees you need a very large sample and a lot of data.
I like bees and keep a number of hives, but doing research on them is not easy.
....they probably thought it was a call from their Unite representative telling them to go on strike.
It doesn't actually state in the pdf whether the phones were on silent, vibrate or normal ringtone (or a combination of ringtone and vibrate) but I know that when peoples mobile phones keep ringing around me it makes it much harder to concentrate on what I am doing because of the noise.
I'm not suggesting that it's impossible for mobiles to adversely affect bees but this study has about as much scientific impact as a fart in a hurricane.
... these people seem to be saying that bees are susceptible to the radio part of the EM spectrum. The radio waves that are there regardless of whether they are being received by - in this case - mobile phones in the vicinity? Or only those produced when the phone transmits, which couldn't affect the bees if the phones weren't strapped to the hives because of the inverse square rule?
Without knowing what hives do when strange noises happen close to the hive, this is pointless. As far as I am aware (though I may have missed something somewhere), there is no evidence that any organism has the ability to detect, or be affected by, waves in the radio part of the spectrum. If this research was done properly and came up with a correlation between radio waves and bee activity, it might lead to genuinely interesting and important insights. However, as I've said before on this forum in respect of other anti-tech propaganda, exceptional claims demand exceptional proof, and I'm just not seeing it here.
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