(Photo: MvB)
“Cell Phones Caused Mysterious Worldwide Bee Deaths, Study Finds,” screams FOX News, reliably. Fast Company chimes in, “Cell Phones Are Killing The Bees: Study.” “Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?” worries The Independent. CNN World more soberly says, “Study links bee decline to cell phones.”
But just as a cautionary note, only the FOX News and Fast Company items refer to the most recent study implicating cell phones as bee-killers. The Independent story is from 2007. CNN World, 2010. (Here’s a rebuttal to that last one.)
Basically, every year a study comes out that puts very tenuous blame on cell phones, to the point that I almost suspect they’re funded by frontrunner bee-apocalypse culprit, neonicotinoid pesticide manufacturers. The evidence against pesticides–that they work–is far more substantive.
It may surprise you to learn, given the headlines, that this most recent study’s results, published in the beekeeper journal Apidologie, have nothing at all to do with bee deaths. Swiss researcher Daniel Favre, scientific collaborator in the Laboratory of Cellular Biotechnology (LBTC) at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, put mobile phones in five different hives and tested the bees’ response to them while the phones were a) off, b) on standby, and c) taking calls.
The bees ignored the phones unless they were making and receiving calls for 25 to 40 minutes. Then:
The audiograms and spectrograms revealed that active mobile phone handsets have a dramatic impact on the behavior of the bees, namely by inducing the worker piping signal. In natural conditions, worker piping either announces the swarming process of the bee colony or is a signal of a disturbed bee colony. [emphasis added]
It’s worth underlining that while Favre speculates that the “induction of honeybee worker piping by the electromagnetic fields of mobile phones might have dramatic consequences in terms of colony losses due to unexpected swarming,” his experiment never produced swarming.
The sum total of his experimental results is that a cell phone call of 25 to 40 minutes got a hive of bees to grumble about it. (Once again, we learn bees are like us.) Favre seems to think this automatically implicates electromagnetic radiation, but phones will also run hot after a 30-minute call.
So how did we get to the phone as a weapon of bee mass destruction? Favre’s study simply references a 2009 study by Sahib Pattazhy that “suggested that cell phones and cellphone towers near beehives interfere with honeybee navigation: in one experiment, it was found that when a mobile phone was kept near a beehive it resulted in collapse of the colony in 5 to 10 days, with the worker bees failing to return home, leaving the hives with just queens, eggs and hive-bound immature bees.” Needless to say, this outcome has not been widely reproduced.
Quick thought experiment here: How much do you think it would cost to strap cell phones to 35 percent of the U.S. bee population? That’s how much we’ve been losing in colony collapse disorder, and the hard truth is that bees rarely get good cell service. Most bees do not live in highly urbanized areas, where the bulk of cell phones and cell towers live. (“There are a number of things that cause bad cell phone reception in rural areas. One is that cell towers, due to lack of enough revenue, are spaced farther apart.”)
One thing I can promise you is that the vast majority of beekeepers are not going out to their hives to make phone calls, and in fact, going to each hive, placing a phone inside it, and then placing a 30-minute call while on speakerphone. Let’s stay focused on finding real bee-killers, please.
Most cell towers and active cell phones are in urban areas, studies in the UK have shown that hives in urban areas are least likely to suffer colony collapse. Maybe bees like cell phones?
I LOVE BEES. A lot. But I’m also a bit skeptical
about this sort of article. Here’s a recent one that suggests that the
research may not be complete, and may even be funded by pesticide
manufacturers! http://sunbreakmagazine.com/2011/05/13/bees-rest-of-planet-annoyed-by-your-cell-phone-call/
oops! haha…I was trying to link this article with another and messed up… sorry!
It’s nicotine based pesticides that are killing bees- the cell phone calls just annoy them, hence the headline.
And yes, the cell phones annoy the rest of the planet also, but so does a lot of stuff that humans do.
that’s really interesting points that cell phones can kill bees.
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