(our bees?) I overheard some people talking about this today and immediately went home and googled, “bees and cell phones” and learned that this is all over the Internet right now.Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious ‘colony collapse’ of bees.

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees’ navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Obviously, these are preliminary findings, but if this turns out to be true, I’ll smash my phone in a heart beat. Will you? Excuse me, but I’d rather live in a world with bees. Another article explains an experiment.

The small study, led by Prof. Jochen Kuhn of Landau University, suggests that radiation from widely used cellphones may mess up the bees’ homing abilities by interfering with the neurological mechanisms that govern learning and memory. It also appears to disrupt the insects’ ability to communicate with each other.

To conduct the study, Kuhn placed cellphone handsets near hives and observed that radiation in the frequency range of 900 to 1800 megahertz caused the bees to avoid their homes.

Back in February, they were calling this phenomenon, which causes agricultural honeybees around the country to abandon their hives and disappear Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under environmental injustice. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.