Cell phones the cause of CCD?

[gardenbees]

Interesting theory but not a lot of evidence to back it up. I think I'll go and put my cell phone on top of the hive and see if the girls still go inside. :) Theresa.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

[John Gesner]

Interesting theory. Seems like it would be easy to prove/disprove. Since cell phone use is more concentrated in metropolitan areas and along interstates, there should be a noticeable increase in CCD occurence in those areas...

Hmm. My job dictates that I carry a cell phone all the time. You'd think I'd get stung less while wearing my phone... :D

[IslandMountainFarm]

of CCD. For me the fact that NOTHING goes into those abandoned hives to rob them out is very disturbing. A hive full of goodies with nobody protecting it and nobody comes in to clean it out? That can't be good.

[BjornBee]

"Hives are not robbed out".....it takes one person to make a statement like this and the next thing you know its gone beyond urban legend status and reaches near proven fact.

I have many deadouts that have sat since last fall, all open, and are not robbed out. Yes, you can say I'm not down south or in a warmer climate, but I have seen hives go through a good part of the summer without being touched as bees are much inclined to collect nectar then rob from another.

Are we talking about hives being taken to another location to see if healthy hives would rob the honey? (assuming these bees would rob at a time when they have adequate flower sources.)

Or are we talking about hives from the same apairy not robbing out other hives from the same apiary. Why would I assume that those existing hives not killed by CCD, that they are in a better state of health to rob out? Assuming these other hives have CCD problems and just not have died yet, I can only understand that they would not be robbing anything out. Sick bees do not do many things that they normally would.

And if there is any real evidence to suggest that robbing SHOULD occurr, and its just not being done, I believe it may be due to toxins left behind from a host of multiple vectors. There is a reason why hives sometimes smell the way they do. Its not the AFB that smells so bad. Its the toxins that the desease leaves behind as it does its damage. Why would it not be true for the many virus and bacteria factors being found in CCD hives?

These toxins are a by product of the bees collapse and the rampant destruction of the secondary viral and bacterial issues. Maybe the bees know that they should avoid them.

I question the whole "not robbed out" comment. Its like the first who mentioned in a book..."AFB smells like a gluepot" No it does not! But once mentioned and printed in type, its been reused for many years.

Were there even healthy bees in the area in a position to rob? Would they normally rob at this time of the year? And if there was, EFB for one has been found in nearly all CCD hives, no doubt leaving toxins in its wake. So maybe the bees avoid the empty hives for this reason.

[IslandMountainFarm]

My understanding is that NO insect is going into the hives, not just other bees. That's the part I find disconcerting not that the hives weren't being robbed by other bees. Sorry I wasn't clear enough on that point.

[Ann]

Well, our hives were not robbed out - but that's because it'd been so damned cold! The first day it warmed up there were plenty of robbers at the gate - but we shut the hives up tight, so they were frustrated robbers :)

[JohnBeeMan]

>>>>cell phones and CCD???
Maybe they are still out there some place saying, "Can you hear me now".

If it was caused by cell phones, why would it happen it the wide open space of the western states more than the states east of the Mississippi? One would expect it to follow the cell phone coverage areas as its primary affected zones.

Then, maybe it is UFOs. They could be taking them to who knows where. ;)

[beegee]

I met a guy who designs analog chips for cell phones. He said he won't own a cell phone because the amount of radiation is too intense. He said he feared there would be a whole generation with brain cancer from cell phones. Ordinarily, I dismiss such claims, but he does work for a chip manufacturer in Maryland and has won awards for his work.

[sierrabees]

I think the bees are using cell phones to call home when they get lost. We all know how unreliable those d---n things are. They just can't get reliable flying instructions through the cut outs and static.

[tecumseh]

island mountain sezs:
My understanding is that NO insect is going into the hives, not just other bees. That's the part I find disconcerting not that the hives weren't being robbed by other bees. Sorry I wasn't clear enough on that point.

tecumseh replies:
this is my understanding also islandmountain. actually one of the really early first reports (from a bee keeper in florida) stated that neither the wax moth nor shb would touch the resources within the hive until the lid had been pull and the box aired out for two days. quite 'likely' if this had not been so then the bee keepers would have recognized the die off more immediately due to the litter thrown out at the front door.

[Kieck]

Why wouldn't CCD have begun showing up years ago? Cell phones (and any radiation they produce) didn't just appear on the market last year.

[Chrissy Shaw]

I speak with a good number of beekeepers and this cell phone solution comes up a great deal. There are some very old reports of dwindling and there some substancial reports from the sixties and seventies according to Dr. Fischer and others. Had the Internet not been here, there would have been much less information on this problem. I wrote someone today to ask, since we have this problem crop up every decade or so and have never found out the cause, is it now wise to spend a great deal of money out of beekeeper's pockets to fund research on a problem that has never been clearly defined beyond symptoms every ten years or so? For me, that is what the federal research grants are there for.

I want to point out, that while we are currently under the threat of whatever this is, it also historically passes just as mysteriously. There are a number of very important issues around our food that have been brought to light as a result of this winter's media attention--some of those affect you and your food sources every day. Those are worth attention. As for CCD, that is a new name, but the longer the mystery is around, the more it seems the same box in our beekeeping closet has a new name, not a new box.

I want us all to save our limited resources, i want the taxes i have paid to go to research. BTW, i got rid of my cell because it made my ear tingle and get hot, then the bill came and i really got hot.

Chrissy

[buckbee]

It occurs to me that wire mesh screens - SBBs - would act as aerials for cellphone signals - maybe...

Don't suppose there is any correlation between CCD colonies and SBBs...?

[George Fergusson]

It occurs to me that wire mesh screens - SBBs - would act as aerials for cellphone signals - maybe...

Don't suppose there is any correlation between CCD colonies and SBBs...?

I have screened bottom boards, I haven't lost any hives to CCD. I haven't lost any hives over the past year that I can attribute to CCD.

The first thing that struck me when I took up beekeeping was what were generally considered "acceptable losses". I was shocked to learn that beekeepers could lose upward of 50% of their hives over winter and still consider it "acceptable". Some beekeepers could lose 80-90% and shrug it off. Beekeepers that lost 10% or less figured they were doing Real Good. Wassup with that? Do you suppose your local dairy farmer would consider losing 10% of his cows over winter to be "acceptable"? I don't think so!

So in my humble opinion, the beekeeping industry has been experiencing what I would consider totally unacceptable losses for YEARS. Now along comes CCD. What am I to think?

[sierrabees]

<It occurs to me that wire mesh screens - SBBs - would act as aerials for cellphone signals - maybe...>

Wire mesh is often used as a shield to block radio waves rather than to recieve them. Since the SBBs are oriented toward the ground rather than in the direction radio waves come from, and microwaves unlike lower frequency radiation, do not readily change direction or reflect off the ionisphere, I doubt that they could become antenna for cell phone radiation.

I don't doubt that people who walk around with cell phones glued to their ear are getting enough radiation to cause problems, but I have to think that our bees are unlikely to be effected much. Most of the big yards with hundreds of beehives are located in areas where cell phone reception is difficult or impossable to get, yet many of the bees kept in such yards are effected by CCD.

This does bring to mind another off the wall thought. I have hives on a trailer with electrified stock panaling for a bear fence. On one side of the trailer the panaling comes about 3/8" away from a fender and if the humidity is high it tends to throw an arc every time the charger fires. The bees on the opposite side of the trailer are thriving while the hives on the side near the short are doing poorly. Since the first radio transmitters generated radio waves by using an electrical arc, my trailer may be sending out the whole spectrum of radiation. More likely the fact that the side that is thriving is facing SE while the side that does poorly faces NW has more to do with it, but maybe this thought will push me to do someing about the arc.

[peggjam]

Grasping at straws.......:)

[sqkcrk]

Technology has been making things smaller and smaller, but I didn't know that phones had gotten that small. And whose paying for these plans. Certainly not the bees.

[Ian]

>>could lose upward of 50% of their hives over winter and still consider it "acceptable". Some beekeepers could lose 80-90% and shrug it off. Beekeepers that lost 10% or less figured they were doing Real Good. Wassup with that?

Now George,

Talk to a Canadian beekeeper, under 20% wintering loss is good. Many shoot for 10% winter loss and usually take a 20% yearly loss. Varroa has really put a strain on that notion.

Talk to a migratory beekeeper in the US, and I do believe the loss acceptance is much different. Those hives are going all the time, and many more splits will be made from the hives than we make up here.

What am I trying to say, well, everything is regional,

[Chrissy Shaw]

The amount of losses one accepts.

[MichaelW]

Come on people, its not cell phones, its CHEMTRAILS!!

See this thread...

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=209421

[Tia]

I'm with Island Mountain and Tecumseh. That's the point that disturbs me. . .no shb or wax moths? Unheard of in an abandoned hive!

[summersetretrievers]

"don't doubt that people who walk around with cell phones glued to their ear are getting enough radiation to cause problems"
Not so see below.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6502.html
Be afraid. Be very afraid. That's the message from the Swedish National Institute for Working Life, which has just completed a massive study on the cancer risks from cell phone use. Their results, which appear in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health (one of my favorite sources of light reading), suggests that heavy cell phone users do in fact raise their risk for tumors, especially on the side of the head they use most often.

The study looked at 2,200 cancer patients and the same number of healthy ones to see if any sort of connection could be drawn between specific cancers and heavy mobile phone usage. The answer was yes.

Kjell Mild, who led the study, said the figures meant that heavy users of mobile phones had a 240 percent increased risk of a malignant tumor on the side of the head the phone is used.

Cindy

[Jim Fischer]

Here ya go, this ought to put a stake through the heart of this
thing. Feel free to copy, redistribute, edit, slice, dice, whatever:

http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704c&L=bee-l&T=0&P=7045

===========================================
Cell Phones and Bees - Hysterical Speculation,
Based Upon Defective "Research"
===========================================

When e-mailed, Prof Hermann Stever, one of the researchers
involved in the studies cited by the press articles about
"cell phones and bees", such as:
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece
replied as follows:

> "First of all I have to clear up that our research is
> specifically not related on the massive losses of bees
> around the world lately (often called "CCD"). We study
> the influence of electromagnetic fields (especially of
> DECT-mobile phone) on the learning ability of bees.
> So we can not explain the CCD-phenomenon itself.
> Attached to this email you find a contribution concerning
> our pilot-study in 2005 published in the paper "ACTA SYSTEMICA
> - IIAS International Journal" (Vol. VI, No. 1, pp. 1-6).
> Because of many inquiries, a contribution concerning our
> follow up-study in 2006 today is published in English on
> our website http://agbi.uni-landau.de/materialien.htm.


I've glanced at the preprints of the papers they have produced,
and I was thoroughly unimpressed, both with the basic techniques
employed, and with startling lack of understanding of "basic bee
behavior and biology" evinced by the methodology and the
interpretation of the "data".

I'd submit that no actual "data" was gathered at all, due
to basic and massive mistakes in experiment design, as
follows:

In one paper:
http://agbi.uni-landau.de/material_download/preprint_IAAS_2007.pdf
they compared return times for bees that had been trapped exiting
the hive, gassed with CO2, marked, and then released 500 meters
away from the hive.

Problem is, they may have been trapping experienced foragers in
some cases, and bees on their first orientation flight in others.
They also apparently had no idea that a forager, trapped upon
exiting the hive and then released, has no interest in returning
directly to the hive, but instead, will still go out and forage,
even after being trapped, detained, gassed, marked, and released.
In this context, measuring "return time" is so utterly meaningless
that it can be considered a random number.

I lead workshops on bee-lining here and there, and if weather is
poor or time available is short, we will capture bees exiting a
hive's entrance reducer to "pre-load" bee-lining boxes for the
workshop participants to save them the trouble of capturing bees
from flower patches. Even though the bees are left in the feeding
chamber long enough for them all to "tank up" with nectar, some bees,
upon release, will do the sort of hovering flight one sees at a hive
entrance, orienting to the bee-lining box, rather than a hive
entrance. These are clearly bees that were captured "in error",
bees with perhaps no flight experience at all, certainly bees
without a firm handle on the hive's location or the local terrain.
These bees are certain to have slim chances of returning to their
hive in any reasonable time period, if they return at all.

If I were to capture and then release bees without providing them
with "nectar" and time to "tank up", bees with less than a "full
tank" are certain to continue foraging, rather than return directly
to the hive, which would makes the "winners" of the contest the
bees that are foraging on the closest patch of blooms currently
providing some groceries.


In the other paper:
http://agbi.uni-landau.de/material_download/IAAS_2006.pdf
We find the statement (confession!):

"In the course of the experiment three exposed colonies
and one non-exposed colony broke down. To compute the
average weight of the honeycombs over all analyzed
colonies their weight was used at the time of the breakdown.
While the weight of the frames for the honeycombs was similar
at the beginning, the average total weights of the honeycombs,
which were built by non-exposed bees, came to 1326 g while
the average honeycomb weight of the exposed bees amount 1045 g.
The difference of 281 g corresponds to 21.1%."

So, the results were skewed by using data from colonies that
were on the verge of "break down" (from varroa infestation,
one assumes), and of 16 total colonies, only one of the eight
"non-exposed" hives "broke down", while three of the eight
"exposed" hives "broke down".

It should be no wonder at all that when 3 of 8 colonies in
one group of hives is suffering from something that causes
them to "break down", that group of colonies will have a
lower colony weight gain. When the other group has only
one hive "break down", it is highly likely to have a much
better set of "weight gain" numbers.

Apparently, the peer review group selected for the "International
Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics"
(where these papers have been either submitted or published)
does not include beekeepers, entomologists, or even intelligent
12-year olds who have read a few books about bees.

To summarize, the press reporting was pure speculation by
reporters who neglected to ask even basic questions of the
authors of the cited papers, and was based upon "science"
that would not even get past the editor of one's local
beekeeper association newsletter.

[George Fergusson]

Now George,

Talk to a Canadian beekeeper, under 20% wintering loss is good. Many shoot for 10% winter loss and usually take a 20% yearly loss. Varroa has really put a strain on that notion.

Well, I did say "when I took up beekeeping". Those were my initial impressions and I have, quite naturally, since revised my opinion on what is and isn't an acceptable loss.


Talk to a migratory beekeeper in the US, and I do believe the loss acceptance is much different. Those hives are going all the time, and many more splits will be made from the hives than we make up here.

I've read on BEE-L that some large beekeepers routinely "depopulate" 50% or more of their hives every fall in order to have equipment to make splits into. Presumably they select those colonies that they expect not to make it through winter for whatever reasons, or have been performing poorly. Then they truck them off to some southern locale come fall, split the daylights out of them, pump them up with pollen substitute and HFCS, treat for mites, then truck them off to Almonds for another go.

Frankly, it seems alien to me. Perhaps I should just say it's not beekeeping the way I intend to practice it.


What am I trying to say, well, everything is regional,

Quite right Ian :)

[Aspera]

George you may want to consider growing your own food. As far as I can tell, the only thing that differentiates migratory beekeepers from other forms of large scale agriculture is that they are migratory. Given the amount of energy used to truck product to market, this may not even be a significant distinction anymore.

[George Fergusson]

George you may want to consider growing your own food. As far as I can tell, the only thing that differentiates migratory beekeepers from other forms of large scale agriculture is that they are migratory. Given the amount of energy used to truck product to market, this may not even be a significant distinction anymore.

Eh.. we grow as much as we can given what time and energy we have to put into it. We could up our production at the risk of say, not paying our property taxes or home mortgage. I dare say we grow more of our own food than a lot of folks, not nearly as much as some others nor as much as I'd like. We've got plans to grow more in the future, a little bit more, every year.

I suppose it sounds like I'm complaining about Big Beekeeping and I suppose in a sense I am taking shots at an industry upon which I largely rely for my food. What a hypocrite I am! However in my defense I say their business model need not be my business model and I need not emulate their management practices in my operation or condone them in theirs. I aim for a more sustainable and enjoyable beekeeping experience than what the big guys are shooting for... which really just points up my most basic concern... that Big Beekeeping as currently practiced and where it's headed... it just isn't sustainable.

Isn't that the problem we're seeing now? Isn't CCD the cumulative effect of our non-sustainable beekeeping practices beginning to catch up with us? I think it is. Oh heck, let's lump Agribusiness Farming practices in with it too, there's no sense putting all the blame on beekeepers trying to make a living.

[Ian]

>>Big Beekeeping as currently practiced and where it's headed... it just isn't sustainable.


Sustaianable within our current safty net structure, but then again, they are able to produce the product at customer request.
Give the producer more money for the produce, and there will be no need for safty net stabalization

[JohnBeeMan]

received this in an email today - looks as if it is spreading.
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

[Brent Bean]

Dose anyone know exactly what kind of radiation a cell phone gives off? Gamma? Beta? Or Alpha. I would guess none of the above it’s more likely and inductive field similar to what’s given off by power lines. Remember the national hysteria about EMF killing everything, until many millions or billions of dollars were spent on research only to find that it wasn’t hurting anything. The theory that cell phones are causing CCD sounds like bolder dash. And is only worthy of a good laugh. CCD has went by other names and goes back into the 19th century. There are a lot of other plausible theories like chemical or viral contamination. After all we used DDT for decades before we wised up to what it was doing to the environment. Cell phones and CCD No Way!

[Ian]

You would be suprised how many people have come up to me and asked about this :)
And they were completely serious,

[bbbbeeman]

you know my phone bill has been going up and I bet those bee have useing it. I leave it in the truck but they must be flying in there when I am not looking. good luck ROCK.

[busybguy]

I promised my customers I would not let my bees use cell phones. That said I'll throw in two cents worth. If indeed cell phone radiation is causing the bees to lose their direction, what are the hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead and transmitting radio, television, etc, waves doing to the bees. How about micro towers ? Sorry if I caused anyone to lose sleep.
I noticed several years ago that when I had hives near high tension power lines the bees there got nasty. When taken away from that area they wuold go back to their sweet selves in about two weeks.

[bbbbeeman]

yes I have known for some time that static electricity will upset the girls, when the wind blows or a thunder storm comes up it time to go to the house.good luck ROCK.

[peggjam]

CNN had a story on this yesterday....just goes to show they'll put on anything with or without facts to back it up:) .