No, Cell Phones Are Not Killing Bees!
June 1st, 2010
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Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomena which has been observed in North America, Europe and to a lesser extent Asia and Australia. It’s the depopulation of bees, primarily European honey bees and related species and has caused a great deal of concern over the potential impacts to pollination of vital crops. The problem has become acute in recent years, with some areas seeing as many as 40% of honey bee colonies die off due to CCD.
The exact cause of the condition remains uncertain, but data indicates that the most likely cause is related to parasites or viral infection of the bees. This may be exacerbated by other stresses on the species including localized pollution, insecticides and environmental changes. Israel acute paralysis virus has been suggested as a likely cause or contributing factor to colony collapse.
Unfortunately, the condition has also been a lightning rod for questionable scientific claims. For some time, a number of groups have latched onto this and claimed that it is likely the result of genetic engineering of plants or other organisms. Despite there being no evidence for this, the Sierra Club stated:
Highly respected scientists believe that exposure to genetically engineered crops and their plant-produced pesticides merit serious consideration as either the cause or a contributory factor to the development and spread of CCD
Well no scientist I have much respect for.
Needless to say, there’s no evidence for this and no reason to presume it would be the case. Others have blamed the feeding of bees with high fructose corn syrup or other sugars from genetically modified plants. This despite the fact that the phenomena has not been shown to have any relationship to this practice. It has also not been shown to be more likely to occur in areas where genetically modified crops are in use. Indeed, colony collapse has been seen across Europe, including areas where genetically engineered crops are all but non-existent.
Others have claimed that colony collapse is related to electromagnetic radiation, especially from cell phones. This claim too lacks any empirical evidence to support it and would seem to make even less sense than some of the others. Somehow these honeybees of the UK were able to whether World War II and the early Cold War, despite the Island nation bristling with high power RAF radar installations. The hundreds of kilowatts of FM radio and television didn’t phase them nor did the decades of microwave relay networks. Now, however, some are claiming that the minuscule amount of radiation from a cell phone tower is killing bees and thus endangering civilization as we know it.
There is also no explanation given for why there appears to be no coloration at all between cell phone coverage or signal strength and colony collapse. While colony collapse has been observed in rural areas of the United States (where cell service ranges from fair to poor) it has not been seen in parts of Asia that have extreme density of mobile base stations. In Europe, CCD appears to be limited primarily to southern portions of the continent. The UK, Sweden and other countries have seen only sporadic and mild to moderate cases of CCD. This despite the fact that their mobile coverage is at least as good (or better than) that found in the rural US or other areas where CCD has been at its worst.
To this end, a study was conducted, and not surprisingly, it’s a very poor one.
Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.
Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.
They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.
After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.
Do I need to go any further with this? They came to the conclusion based on TWO hives. ONE active and ONE control. Three months, one experiment, two hives.
I am glad, however, to see that the Telegraph also published an opposing (and correct) viewpoint:
Mobile phones and bees: shoddy research helps no one
Riding high at the top of the most viewed list in the Telegraph earth section today is a story headed ‘Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee‘, which describes a study of hives in India and concludes that electromagnetic radiation is the cause of colony collapse disorder [CCD], the phenomenon – that has mostly affected the United States – of beehive populations crashing with no obvious cause.
As a beekeeper myself I’d be very glad to know what has caused the problems plaguing the almond and cotton fields of the US, but I’m afraid that this study does little to get us closer to an answer.
The researchers took four hives and placed two working 900MHz mobile phones (a very common frequency) in two of them and dummy, non-functioning phones in the other two. From February to April they were put in call mode for 15 minutes a day between 11am and 3pm, twice a week. The hives with phones were found to produce less honey, and their queens laid fewer eggs.
Combined with previous studies that found adverse effects on honeybees from electrical power lines, the researchers conclude that ‘the present study therefore suggests that colony collapse does occur as a result of exposure to cellphone radiations,’ but it does nothing of the sort.
Four hives is an incredibly small sample size, and every beekeeper will tell you that hives right next to each other can thrive or fail for a huge variety of reasons. No sensible conclusion can be drawn from such a tiny experiment.
It’s also the case that most colony collapse has been observed in rural America, where mobile phone coverage is poor. No attempt to measure signal strength in fields where colonies have been lost was made. The researchers note that the countries that have reported CCD (the US, areas of southern Europe) are all in the developed world, where mobile phones are ubiquitous, whereas countries such as India, where technology that generates electromagnetic radiation is ‘comparatively new’ are unaffected. As GSM 900MHz networks are very common in India and throughout the developing world, this is clearly false. The UK is also unaffected by CCD, and we have some of the best mobile phone coverage in the world.
Unfortunately, this “study” has been getting far more press than it deserves and articles critical of it have been getting all too little. Yet that seems to be the way it always is, doesn’t it?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Not Even Wrong, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 1st, 2010 at 11:41 pm
“Highly respected scientists believe….” respected that is by the Sierra Club, because they say what the Club wants to hear.
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June 1st, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Join the campain to stop bees owning cell phones
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June 2nd, 2010 at 12:15 am
i my experience bees and wasps/hornets or whatever other stinger-equipped cousins they may have are not at all bothered by UHF emissions. They live, apparently quite healthily in transmitter towers at levels that are high enough to exceed human exposure standards when they’re running at full power.
Actually when a work crew comes across an unexpected nest it can be a very dangerous situation. Getting stung repeatedly by a swarm of angry bees is a recipe for disaster when someone is working on a roof or a tower. The damn bees seem to like the areas where equipment creates a sheltered nitch for them you can’t always see from the ground.
Any time any equipment outdoors is serviced, always keep a couple of cans of very potent bee killer spray in the truck.
I guess some would start off saying that it’s not necessarily European honey bees that will nest there, and they may be right. I don’t see how that one breed would be sensitive to it when others have no issue nesting right on a transmitter.
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June 2nd, 2010 at 7:05 am
Maybe just maybe the bee’s themselves are self regulating. I mean there are MORE bees today to do our crops than at any other time. It just may be that the bees actually know how many can be accomodated by the crops and pollen in specific areas. Of course I have NO evidence to spport this hypothisis!!!
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June 2nd, 2010 at 7:08 am
Just to make the point, the specific effects of a transmitter (phone) in a hive are not the same as the wider effects of mobile phone masts being dotted around the countryside. So even if these fools proved across a thousand hives that sticking a phone in them was bad news, it wouldn’t necessarily mean much.
Dionigi said:
Except this. Which is perfectly valid.
I’m starting to feel that the world needs a science-satire programme, in much the same way there are dozens of highly respected political satire TV shows. It could be called “Tin Foil Hat” and simply take the piss out of the amountof shocking science being thrown around out there in much the same way that “Brass Eye” and “The Day Today” did for all sorts of socio-political issues.
Non-UK users might not get the references, in which case see if you can order them off Amazon. It will not be money wasted.
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June 2nd, 2010 at 8:09 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
While that would a fantastic show, the only problem I can see is that there would be some people who would take it seriously. Which would just lead to more problems.
“SEE! Big Science is giving cell phones to bees because they WANT them to die! WHAT ELSE AREN’T THEY TELLING US!?”
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June 2nd, 2010 at 8:41 am
I think it is obvious what is happening –
GMOs cause the bees to die – but Cell Phone RF protects the bees from the GMOs. The solution is more cell towers.
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June 2nd, 2010 at 10:17 am
Curtains said:
A very valid point. Just like the chavs who took Ali G seriously.
Any day now we’ll get some fruitloop or other attempting to fit little foil hats to bees.
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June 2nd, 2010 at 10:28 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
Yeah, it’s not even comparable. All I can think is either they were just setting this up for some kind of stunt (probably) or maybe the idea that this somehow would demonstrate a link between the emissions at high levels and thus could show lower levels are plausible? I mean, the signals from phone to tower are basically the same as tower to phone (same approximate frequency)
Really though, it’s horrible that this even made news. Was this published in a journal? If so, that takes things to a new level of idiotic. This is not something I’d expect from a freshman science class, or even a high school science class!
Seriously, I’ve seen better experimental controls and rigger on Mythbusters. I’m not even kidding or being sarcastic! I literally have seen them do case-control experiments on Mythbusters with plants or animals and actually have better, larger control groups and on top of that, they’re actually smart enough to say at the end their experiment was too limited to draw any serious conclusions beyond “plausible” from.
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June 2nd, 2010 at 11:02 am
It seems that the worst is over. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
As of 2009, the number of reported cases of CCD in the U.S. has dropped considerably; over the 2008/2009 winter, a total loss of 28.6% of managed honey bee colonies was recorded in the U.S., and only 15% of that subset (equal to only 4.3% of the national total) died with symptoms of CCD.
Most sources say that last winter was bad for the bees, but this is the first one I’ve seen that actually said what percent of that loss was CCD. It was a cold winter that caused these loses, obviously caused by global warming.
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June 3rd, 2010 at 12:02 am
So maybe this experiment does not prove this but does it prove it is not the case either? A lot of scientists seem worried, and look at the other science behind cell phone dangers. There was a huge study a couple weeks ago that found people who use phones morew than 30 minutes a day were at a very high risk of deadly brain cancer. Did you see that one?
You know what bad science is? It is saying “No, Cell Phones Are Not Killing Bees!” because you don’t know this for sure! You can just say, okay, maybe the data is not totally proven but you can’t say it’s proven harmless.
I am very worried about all this radiation we’re exposed to and exposing other life on the planet to. More and more science says it causes cancer. What might it do to other animals? You can’t escape it these days and I know people who it is making very sick with headaches and tiredness. Who is to say it is not causing more harm? We are so obsessed with carbon pollution, I think we forgot about radio pollution and electro pollution. Chances are, it is more dangerous. We know radiation is the main cause of cancer. We can’t keep this up.
What about you? What about your family? It might seem nice to deny it but we’re all in this boat because our world is so flooded with radiation.
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June 3rd, 2010 at 12:10 am
Jason said:
Bring on the fruit loops with foil hats.
Jason – please do some research. Read something – something printed on paper and peer reviewed. The study you refer to said no such thing. 20 years of studies have said no such thing. Please do not take my word for it – read it yourself and use the brain you were born with.
(anyone want to know why I quit teaching?)
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June 3rd, 2010 at 2:27 am
Jason said:
Yes, the world is flooded with radiation. Go outside during the day sometime. See that big, bright orange thing up in the sky? It’s called the sun, and it is bombing us with killer ionizing UV rays of cancerous death.
As Ranger Gord once pointed out, we must destroy the sun before it kills us all!
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June 3rd, 2010 at 7:56 am
I wonder if the increase in organic farming could be related to the increase in phenomena like CCD and sudden oak death?
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June 3rd, 2010 at 10:01 am
Jason said:
Yeah, actually we did.
drbuzz0 even wrote about it: http://depletedcranium.com/cell-phone-study-and-how-it-was-reported/
But just to save you some of the trouble, a quick extract:
Yeah. That study.
Annoyingly, you almost have a valid point, there isn’t any solid evidence to justify the conclusion that mobile phones aren’t killing bees…
Except that colony collapse disorder appears in no way linked to the intensity or coverage of cell phone networks globally. “Proving” a negative is almost imopssible. The onus is always on the proof of a positive correlation, an observable effect.
The link between the two is semi-logical I admit. Bees, flying creatures, small, potentially perturbed by small scale effects in the air. Mobile phones, low power transmission through the air all the time, modern technology being put into place in the past decade or so. Colony Collapse Disorder, relatively new idea.
To be honest though, you could say that about almost any new technology. What about global warming causing CCD? The rise of AIDS? Increased divorce rates?
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June 3rd, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Jason said:
Who’s “we,” White Man?
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June 3rd, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Well I did a little looking on the allways accurate Wikipedia —
————————————-
We
In English, the first-person plural pronoun, we, is used in both the inclusive sense (you and I) and exclusive sense (someone else and I but not you). It’s also used as a majestic plural.
e.g.: Inclusive use with the speaker:
We can all go to the zoo today.
——————-
This contrasts with exclusive we, which excludes the person being spoken to, e.g.:
We mean to stop your evil plans!
————————
Majestic plural:
We are not amused
————————-
I really hope he was using the Majestic Plural form.
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June 4th, 2010 at 12:17 am
“We” can also mean all of society or humanity in general, as in “We’ve come far in the past hundred years” or to refer to collective knowledge like “We now know mars has no complex life forms”
I think that is probably how he was using the “We.”
Although I would not discount that he believes himself some kind of monarch.
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June 4th, 2010 at 1:34 am
Well, the key point for me is that I’d like to be excluded from the “we” that “know[s] radiation is the main cause of cancer.”
I was wondering if maybe Jason was using “we” to refer to himself and the mouse in his pocket.
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July 4th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
This is the first time I’ve ever stumbled into this website, except for Jason, what a bunch of ARROGANT narrow minded, people! Science is continually growing, and oftentimes, (hang on to your foil hats) changing! Meantime, rest those magnificant brains against those harmless phones and sleep tight! I’m out of here.
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July 23rd, 2010 at 4:47 am
[...] om at mobilstråling påvirker biene og fører til massedød. Ser man på USA viser det seg at det ikke finnes noen sammenheng mellom områder med god mobildekning og bienes massedød. De områder hvor det er rapportert mest [...]
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March 2nd, 2012 at 9:26 pm
“plant-produced pesticides”
Pesticide is pesticide. You honestly don’t think they can be a factor. I’m not saying the sole factor, but part of a combination of factors that are weakening the bees?
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March 2nd, 2012 at 9:45 pm
Kent said:
Colony collapse disorder is a rather new event historically; if pesticide use was a factor one would think that the effect would have shown up some time ago. Pesticides, some far more aggressive that the current ones, have been in regular use for well over half a century.
I suspect that the problem is systemic, that is it is a product of stresses both genetic and acute of current beekeeping and breeding techniques that have made the insets vulnerable to a spectrum of opportunistic pathogens.
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March 3rd, 2012 at 8:20 pm
DV82XL said:
Try responding to the whole quote next time and not selectively quoting, it affects the context of what I said in a big way leaving out part of it.
Your response ignores this: “I’m not saying the sole factor, but part of a combination of factors that are weakening the bees?”
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March 4th, 2012 at 12:14 am
Kent said:
Because your remarks can be seen just above the response, the quote is more of an indication who is being responded to, rather than any attempt to exploit context, as you suggest.
If you read what I wrote, I did answer you completely; I do not think pesticide use is a contributing factor, if it was this problem would have shown up before now, as in general broad-spectrum pesticide use is dropping from past levels. However apiculture with practices that create unnatural conditions in which bees are moved thousands of miles to pollinate commercial crops, frequent opening of the hive for inspection, artificial insemination of queens, routine medication and sugar water feeding may contribute to a general weakening of the constitution of the honey bee, and are more likely factors.
These types of stresses have been responsible for creating weakened strains in other forms of husbandry, and most commercial species have had to be bred specifically to avoid these problems, something that has not happened as yet with the honeybee. The contribution of pesticide use is likely minimal, if indeed it is a factor at all.
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March 5th, 2012 at 5:31 pm
“I do not think pesticide use is a contributing factor, if it was this problem would have shown up before now,”
Not if the main contributor is a newer disease or that is exploiting weakness from pesticide and other factors.
I have to wonder at why you are so adamant to ignore all possible culprits and especially the pesticide industry? Insider?
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March 5th, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Ken said:
Thank you for admitting you don’t actually have an argument.
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March 5th, 2012 at 8:34 pm
Ken said:
No, I’m not an insider, I am a trained scientist, and I have looked at this issue in detail because some in my family are commercial beekeepers. Pesticides have been examined as a possible factor from the beginning and no correlation was found. Not that anything like facts are going to persuade someone that leaps to the conclusion that anyone not agreeing with their unsupported, unreferenced theory must, perforce, be corrupt.
If you can table some peer reviewed support for your ideas, please do, otherwise this conversation is at an end.
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