Cellphones killing bees?

When bees leave the hive, they notice if it is in a new location and remember how to get back. - That is how they have been used for years in "rent a hive" for pollination businesses. Moving hive only a few feet is what confuses them when they return to where it was.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Plankton is a lot more important. Without plankton, we suffocate, whereas we do not need bees for oxygen. We don't even need them for food; corn and wheat need only wind for pollination.

It would be surely sad to lose them, though; we'd lose a fair number of plant species along with them. Most would survive, since we'd still have wasps, ants, beetles, moths, butterflies, hummingbirds, bats and spiders to take over the pollination duties of the bees.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

but plants produce oxygen and absorb co2; so the less plants the less oxygen?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yes. And if we lost all bees we'd lose about 5% of the plants on the planet. The rest (plankton, grass, trees) would still survive, though.

 

Probably not -only different plants, not needing bees, producing the O2.

There is about 3 pounds of O2 over every sq inch of Earth surface. I forget how much O2 a typical human uses each day but seem to remember reading that if production of it completely stopped, the air would still have enough O2 for all now living to die a natural death at age 100. When you exhale, a very high percent (>95% ?) of the O2 you breathed in is still in the exhaled gas.

I am nearly sure, but too lazy to check, that if every plant were "raptured up to heaven tomorrow" what would make the air lethal is not the decreasing O2 content but the increasing CO2 content. As I recall, 5% CO2 would kill us all. If true, that means there would be ~95% of the O2 still left in the air when all humans died. (Each molecule of O2 breathed in, comes back to the air in CO2 molecules eventually.)

SUMMARY: We don't need to thank plants for making O2 as much as we need to thank them for destroying CO2!

 

I was thinking about keeping a hive myself. Apparently here in Nashville I would need some sort of special permit for it.

 

I bet someone sells honey from road side on weekends. Talk to some local bee keepers. Perhaps work out a deal to buy one of their hives with option to return and get half your money back. Give neighbors, if you have any close by a jar of honey each fall if they learn you have a hive.

I bought 2 or 3 pounds of bees + separated queen from Montgumery Wards many years ago. The mailman delivered them. Queen is in small wire cage with sugar disk sealing one end. You remove the foil from disk when all are in the hive. That gives time for bees to accept her as their queen, instead of kill her with quick release. (They eat thru the sugar disk to free her.)

I got the hive box from someone moving away I knew kept bees. If getting used hive, it is good idea to see healthy hives as there is some relatively common fungus or something (I forget) that can be in old hives boxes - only thing to do with them is to burn them. I.e. don't buy hive box stored in a shed if there are no live functioning hives there too. Also buy new some "foundation" = sheets of wax with hexagonal dents to go in the frames. The bees will then make nice flat comb - not a 3D mess and it takes a lot of honey to make wax so that helps hive get strong quickly.

Everything, including the smoker and some "bee-gloves" & net helmet cost me less than $50 but you will probably spend more than $100 to get started. (I sowed the bee-gloves to old white shirt.) I was never stung. I never got brave enough to work with bare arms, etc, but if you move slowly you can. Bees will tolerate being shoved around by your bare hands if you do it slowly. Bees do not like to sting as that is sure death for the bee that does, but make a quick move, even just in the air above the top-off hive and many will attack you.

 

It is always interesting to see how people handle a word like 'radiation' as if it's all that one big bad dangerous type. People, please, read up on the physics before you start to worry too much. Radiation is many things, but the word itself is used in media to scare people (and thus make them listen to whatever they have to say) - because that word have negative feel in our society since the world wars. I'm not saying that there might not be anything to the statements (I don't have the data), but just don't fall for the word hypes, please.

 

Radiation covers us from birth to death and it comprises everything from natural radiation to, in some cases, nuclear.

 

I would be willing. But first I need evidence.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)