I’m not an alarmist. I don’t seek out reasons to be fearful, and I’m skeptical on most political and environmental issues until evidence is damning, or until my intuition points in one direction or another. I would like to believe that our more obvious contributions to environmental destruction can be overcome through heightened public awareness and coordinated action, and that my 9-month-old daughter will be able to survive happily on this planet beyond her teenage years. But every day that belief is harder and harder to maintain.
It’s easy to dismiss the extremists and the conspiracy theorists, but it’s hard to ignore some stories and the evidence that supports them. Even the most stubborn skeptics, who once claimed that the current trend in climate change isn’t significant, have been cornered into accepting the fact that it is, and from there standing on one foot at the top of a stepladder while they claim that humans have nothing to do with it. In the face of overwhelming evidence, they’ve had to at least admit that the basic fact of climate change is true.
Similarly, the fact that bee colonies around the world are disappearing is incontrovertible. It is happening, and in huge numbers. Since the beginning of this year, 70% of the colonies on the east coast of North America have collapsed. Commonly cited in most articles on the subject is this Einstein quote:
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
You can do your own searches on the subject, and feel free to point out evidence that shows me up to be the bleeding-heart pinko tree-hugger that I am. Or how this is another ecocentric canard cooked up by the liberal press. I’d be more interested in hearing ideas about how this problem might be overcome, though.
My personal, completely unsupported theory is that cell phones and cell phone towers are fucking with their little bee-sized navigational systems. Cell phones have got to be responsible for something other than the collapse of civil society.
It’s not like cell phones use some sort of “new” kind of EM wave. That seems like a pretty bizarre claim. I’d think it’s much more likely that it’s the climate, or a disease, or something.
What would convince me of the cell-phone theory’s potential validity is some evidence that cell carriers have begun doing something different as far as what sorts of signals are being used and transmitted over the last couple years.
The real problem is that the bees are dissapearing rather than dying. If they’re dying, you have bodies, and with bodies, you can find the culprit. Without a body, there is no crime, so to speak.
We had a particularly cold winter at strange times; in my city almost all the Mulberries were stunted and still look dead, although a couple are sprouting some sickly looking leaves, because of the early April icestorm freeze that hit with 24 hours of below freezing weather. These are perhaps 20-25% of the cities trees, and i’m curious how many will die this year and how many will bounce back.
The obvious way to test this is truck bee hives into areas that have poor or no cell coverage. Unfortunately, these areas are generally wastes with little agricultural or industrial use, and there might not be enough plants for the bees to survive on. But, it’s what i would do.
The presentation to the House Agriculture Committee doesn’t mention cell phones / electromagnetics as a possible cause, which concerns me.
It’s true we’ve had cell phones for years. But what about wi-fi? That’s relatively new.
Whatever it is, it’s going to be a big pain in the ass to fix it, but also vitally necessary for sustaining human agriculture. If we even CAN figure out what the problem is. Poor goddamn bees, they don’t deserve so much shit from us. Who knows, it may be related to progressive stress from human apiculture…
For me this would be highly unlikely, given that the occurance of this phenomenon is extremely rare in Europe, and yet our density of cell phones per square mile is way higher than the US.
I can’t remember where I read it, but this is basically a production issue. Using bees for pollination greatly increases production. Also, it’s specific crops that need it more than others.
Not every species of bee is being affected by CCD. Beekeepers will grow their colonies of other species of bee and start travelling with them instead of the honeybees to keep fields pollinated, so no need to chicken littling about us running out of food.
Still, what a time for me to finally make some mead.
You can feed bees high-fructose corn syrup. The practice of entirely replacing a hive’s honey stores with HFCS is also being blamed for CCD, but that connection doesn’t look strong.
The few scientific papers I’ve found on bees all say that they use the sun and landmarks for navigation, not radio wave receivers. They communicate with the hive with dances, not by receiving transmissions from the queen. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if getting moved all over the place messed with the bees, causing widespread confusion. I’m going to annoy SpoofyChop and say that bee death is due to climate change :P
Heaven forbid we should have to fall back on feeding ourselves with grain crops. I’m really not sure if corn, wheat, rice, etc. are fit to be the food staples of the human race! Er, wait a second…
Yes, you can eat your Wheaties with high fructose corn syrup and drink rice tea. Me, I like my fruits and vegetables, so if you don’t mind too much, I’d like someone to find out what’s going on and fix it, even if that means we don’t get to have cell phones or pesticides or whatever.
I’m all for finding out what’s causing it and fixing the problem, but the idea that it’s caused by cell phones is just absurd. There’s not even a vague correlation between the two; we might as well speculate that bees are vanishing because of the scarcity of turn-based strategy games.
