Cellphones killing bees?

so when they say the honeybees are gone, do they mean they aren't dead in their hives? They have just vanished?

 

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Yup. They just up and left. Abandoned the queen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder

 

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The Swiss are now backing up the Indian research and cellphones are looking more and more to be a significant part of the dying bees.

How will humans deal with their new addiction?

http://www.themoneytimes.com/featur...es-are-killing-honeybees-id-101701710179.html

 

The Bee is arguably the single most important life form on the planet. Without pollination there is no plant growth, without plants - we STARVE

 

You are aware of the fact that not all plants use bees for pollination. They can use other insects, use the wind, mammals, other animal groups, or self pollination.

And there are also plants who mainly reproduce by expansion and cloning.

So, do you agree that maybe your view is uninformed, over the top, and maybe even ridiculous to anyone who ever took a biology class and paid attention?

 

I find your response OTT, uninformed and maybe ridiculous. My source was an very interesting programme on discovery tv in which some very eminent people like David Bellamy were explained what would happen to planetary diversity if the humble Bee was absent.

I was speaking volumes in a sentence, if had wanted to pad it out, I would have, given the time.

Like a lot of people in here, I am knowledgeable of a lot of things, expert on some, not on others. I find the intolerance of some to others literally intollerable and downright arrogant and rude. Are you an amercian by any chance, saviours of the universe?

A forum is for opinion and debate. If you find my post ill informed, please say so but your reply is arrogant and rude.

 

The Feasibility is thus, Energy, Cost and Time. Yes there are some methods of pollination that don't require bee's, however if you haven't noticed when you are down a supermarket (or somewhere like Wallmart) you'll find that the vegetables and fruit available are "Varied". This variety is only possible with the use of bee's as some of the plants that bare fruits and vegetables wouldn't be pollinated otherwise.

There is also the factor that large scale crop farming requires bee's to do the pollination. (In fact there are people that have their entire livelihood based on just operating hives for the pollination of crops) over the past 6 or so years they've had over an 80% fatality rate to their hives. A program on the subject actually suggested that Australia has been lucky and has actually been exporting hives to the rest of the world to attempt to replace the losses.

You might therefore have thought that the foodchain was uneffected, this is only because of outsourcing otherwise we'd be dealing with famines by now.

 

Hello again Stryder, your explanation is much more palatable than the previous one, thanks. May the force (fed) be with you.

 

My bad. I thought this was a science forum.

Please open up your biology book on page 13, chapter 2: plants.

Fact 1: Bees are NOT responsible for ALL plant growth.

Fact 2: Without flowering plants bees cannot survive. Who is now more important? the plants or the bees? Neither. They are in symbiosis. This is the essence of many biological systems. Without humans most cultivated crops would perish. Is man therefore the most important species on the planet? No. Move your viewpoint to the next level and your conclusion changes if you stick to linear thinking (which is of course wrong).

Fact 3: without plants we will suffocate way before we starve.

So while it seems nice to support scientific nonsense by being nice, in this case it is actually hurting the education of the public.

 

Depends on what is meant by "large scale". The kinds of ecological deserts currently found necessary by industrial agribusiness are not at all necessary to the productive farming of extensive landscapes.

You just can't use setups that involve exterminating all the pollinating insects for miles around, and importing honeybees by semitrailer to make up the difference.

The North American native bees, or even just a couple species of the solitary bees and "Bumble" bees, are capable of pollinating everything we need pollinated.

I would miss honeybees, especially the honey, but bumblebees are also good to have around - and they do make honey, high quality honey, if anyone can figure out how to manipulate them properly to get a share of it.

 

The reproduction of plants is simplest as vegetative reproduction – a new tree could just come from a root shoot. The new tree would then be genetically identical with the mother tree. Vegetative reproduction alone would be no problem if the environment were stable, but most environments are not stable over time, they change. It can be climatic changes, new diseases or pests. To be able to adapt to environmental changes there need to be genetically different plants. In that way there will always be some plants, which are better adapted than others because of special genetic constitutions. The only way to constantly mix the genes for the plants is by cross-pollination, where pollen from one plant is transported by bees to another so that the offspring become genetically different. In that way, there is a greater chance for at least some of the offspring to survive in the competition of life. In this we find the bees as one of the most important factors.

 

So I take it the scientists tested this theory by killing bees with cellphones? They seem to have a little too much time on their hands.


"shall we cure cancer?"
"no I'm going to see how many fruit pastilles it takes to choke a kestrel"

 

What utter BS. From my understanding the cause of CCD has already been attributed to global warming + these little guys:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor

 

Hardly, The mobile phone industry has been extremely financially lucrative for some people and this has been a concern that the sciences that were suppose to conduct experiments to test the overall safety had actually be undermined because of financial incentives.

 

No that was just one hypothesis, however there was a problem. If such parasites become rife in a hive, it would kill the bees in the hive, leaving bodies.

The problem has been the bee's have left the hive, there are no traces of bodies, this usually implies that the whole swarm has relocated or lost the capacity to function as a hive.

 

I had a hive for a year and a half, and read alot about bees, and did some experiments too. Anyone who can and has some intellectual interest in knowing things, should raise bees thru at least one winter and two summers as I did.

Bee's eyes/ brain system is quite different from one that forms images. The learn patterns of angular light arrival directions to navigate, especially important is the angular location of the sun, which they can tell even on a fully cloud covered day because they can detect polarization of the sky's light. On a cloudy day they know the sun is behind that spot in the sky where there is no polarization* - Bees can't see anything as you and I do.

One warm summer afternoon, I moved my hive only about 4 feet to one side of where it was. Soon there was a cloud of confused bees in front of the old entrance. Slowly, some did get in thru the new entrance location, but they did so by chance - they did not, could not, see the hive only 4 feet away. All they knew while in the "bee cloud" in front of the old location was that in a small set of angles from their position the light intensity was changed due to the hive reflecting differently than the grass etc. would have if it were not there.

Perhaps CCD is related to sudden man made and large area changes** in the reflectivity along their flight path back from some distant nectar source and they simply get lost - can't find their way back to the hive. Once a bee gets off his learned "bee line path" he is effectively lost. I have never hear of this being suggested by anyone, but is an idea to check into.***

*If you have a pair of polarizing sun glasses shut one eye and rotate them as you look (with open eye) thur them at the blue sky at angle far from the sun. I won't go into the physic but when unpolarized light is once scattered thru 90 degrees it is 100% polarized. So try to look at a spot in the sky that is 90 degrees from the sun. For example, if it is 10AM, look at part of the blue sky where the sun will be at 4PM (6 hours later) and see that the sky is very dark, not blue, at one rotation of the polarizer.

** For example, a field they flew by on the way out to the nectar patch has been set on fire, or a parking lot that was full of cars is empty (after ball game is over) and now black asphalt when they try to fly home with their load of nectar.

*** This idea is very easy to test: Take a few dozen bees from the hive, lightly dust them with flour (the standard way to mark bees), and transport them in the dark at least 500 meters from their hive to a location they would not have visited as no nectar sources etc. and see if any can return to the hive. It would be best to do this test in the tropics, when the sun is directly over head, as then then it gives no clue as to which direction to fly.

 

A question on this. I've noticed from watching and reading different things that indicate when ants/bees/termites get sick they tend to leave the nest to die so that the others will not get the disease. Could the lack of bees in CCD cases be caused by this?

 

A friend of mine had a honeybee swarm nest in the back of her pickup truck - in a tool box structure just behind the cab.

They stayed there for a couple of weeks, while she drove several miles to work and back every morning and evening. Probably they lost a few bees, but not enough to collapse the colony.

 

And this has what to do with anything?