think about this next time you use you cel phone.

[Beachboy]

I'm not sure if I'm buying it, but it's very possible. It could happen right here in Puna too!

http://news.independent.co.uk/environmen...449968.ece

[aprild]

This is the scariest thing I've ever heard out of all the scary things happening these days.

I knew bees were disappearing. . . but cell phones? They definitely could have something to do with it. The part I don't understand, though, is why would no predators or scavengers attack the abandoned hives? How could that be affected by cell phones?



april

[Royall]

It is hard to accept that being the cause. I always thought bees navigated by the sun and would pass the directional information along through their "dance".

Royall

What goes around comes around!

[aprild]

I wonder if they really know how bees navigate. I remember reading a huge article about the subject in Scientific American years ago. I'm sure some more recent science could be found on the web.

But--what does it matter if it's cell phones or not? It's the fact that we are losing bees at such an alarming rate. Forget global warming, forget Peak Oil, forget World War, forget nuclear weapons. If we lose the bees, we are totally screwed and faster than we thought.

april

[Kapohocat]

Well the bees wont be affected down here. Our darn cell phones hardly work!

[Hotzcatz]

Nope, not the cause. There isn't enough new cell phone use near the existing bee hives to cause the phenomenon. Generally, people don't hang around bee hives and the hives that are being abandoned have been there for awhile. It would need to be some new source of radio frequency radiation if that were the cause.

They did find some of the varroa mites in Manoa on Oahu, but so far the bees on our island have been mite free. I don't know if there has been any hive loss on either island but I haven't heard of any.

[radioguy]

Cause does not matter, this is the collapse of the food chain for human beings.

[Kahunascott]

This is too funny. Try the Varrona Mite is what is decreasing the bee population not cell phone use. I’m not real technical but I thought cell phones used radio frequency (RF) not microwaves. I thought that microwaves had to be transmitted and received in line of site.
(Pointed at each other with no obstacles in the way) Or, is microwave a form of RF that is magnified. Either way I would look for mites first. Come on know there’s some techies out there.

[radioguy]

Microwaves are RF. Radio Frequency (RF) at the microwave region do exibit line of sight characteristics, but Cell phone TOWERS are line of sight in all directions from the top of the tower looking down and towards to horizon.

It is more than possible that the mircowave rf at that power level could interfere with the bees ability to navigate.

Man made RF radiation is the backbone of the entire wireless industry. European studies have shown a link between brain tumors and cellphone use above 500 hours per month.

A microwave oven is just a microwave radio transmitter, and you can see the effect. In the navy, sailors have been killed because they were standing in front of a radar antenna as the radar was turned on, which transmitting very high power Mircowave "RF". All of my handheld radios have warnings about not letting the antenna line up with your eyes.

Use of microwaves as a weapon is very old news.

I find it amazing how quickly people dismiss the possibly of the link to bee navigation.

This bee story is 6 months old. Colony Collapse Syndrome began last year in the U.S. About 1/2 of the worlds food supply relies on the bees pollinating the plants.
The cause is still unknown, but the mite and other predators were ruled out long ago.

Remember all wireless technology uses RF, at UHF and higher frequencies, including Bluetooth, GPS, Family Radios, Job site radios, Police Radar Guns, Cellphones and Cellphone towers, which are verywhere.

[sansei]

It is believed that many creatures, including bees are sensitive to the earth's magnetic field thereby having a built in compass that is used in conjunction with other sensory inputs for navigation.

Radio waves are sometimes referred to as E-M or electromagnetic waves because they carry both a electrical and magnetic field component. It is not too far fetched to think that a creature sensitive enough could be affected by a radio transmitter. One question I have though is that cell phones have been around for a long time so why are we seeing the problem only now? One answer could be that service providers start placing towers in dense urban areas first and are now moving into more rural farming areas. Cell phones have relatively little transmitter power because they are battery operated. Cell towers are a different story.

The growth of WIFI is another possibility. Most WIFI services operate in the 2.4 GHz band which is the same frequency used by microwave ovens. Microwave ovens work because the frequency causes certain molecules like water and fat to vibrate fast and that is what we call heat. The same frequency band is also used to provide wireless broadband internet service in rural areas.

By the way, frequency and wavelength are inverses of each other so they are two ways of describing the same thing. Micro-wave is a short wavelength = therefore high frequency.