I actually doubt it's cell phones. First, the guy, Jochen Kuhn, who is proposing that as a hypothesis has been smack talking cell phones for 15 years. This career is basically trying to prove that cell phones will destroy the world, which doesn't seem the most honest place to do science from -- I'm very hinky about presuppositionalism in his claims.
Also, where they winter bee hives isn't precisely cell phone central. Plus, so far, and this has been as true in Europe as America, past a certain latitude, colonies have not been undergoing CCD. So, colonies collapsing in America, but so far Canadian beens seem to resist this. You see the same thing in Europe. In Poland and Germany, you see some CCD, but none in Scandinavian countries.
My guess is that the poor bees are just overtired and quite sick. In the US, pretty much every bee in America comes to around 400,000 acres in California to pollinate almond trees. This gives any one bee colony that might be fucked up the opportunity to spread whatever it's gotten to every other bee in America. This is true to a lesser extent in bee colonies in every country, but it's worst in the US because of the economy of almond production in particular. (Tho' I also suspect it's caused by a number of things. All of this travel also means, for instance, that every pesticide in the USA ends up in every bee in America.)
But I seriously doubt that cell phone towers have more than a tangential role to play, because the destruction of colonies seems unconnected to the concentration of cell phone signals and because the researcher who is heading the research is emotionally involved with proving cell phones hurt people.
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Date: 2007-04-27 05:04 pm (UTC)Also, where they winter bee hives isn't precisely cell phone central. Plus, so far, and this has been as true in Europe as America, past a certain latitude, colonies have not been undergoing CCD. So, colonies collapsing in America, but so far Canadian beens seem to resist this. You see the same thing in Europe. In Poland and Germany, you see some CCD, but none in Scandinavian countries.
My guess is that the poor bees are just overtired and quite sick. In the US, pretty much every bee in America comes to around 400,000 acres in California to pollinate almond trees. This gives any one bee colony that might be fucked up the opportunity to spread whatever it's gotten to every other bee in America. This is true to a lesser extent in bee colonies in every country, but it's worst in the US because of the economy of almond production in particular. (Tho' I also suspect it's caused by a number of things. All of this travel also means, for instance, that every pesticide in the USA ends up in every bee in America.)
But I seriously doubt that cell phone towers have more than a tangential role to play, because the destruction of colonies seems unconnected to the concentration of cell phone signals and because the researcher who is heading the research is emotionally involved with proving cell phones hurt people.