Here we go again? Scientist claims cell phones to blame for bee deaths...

Mark's note: Greetings fellow beekeepers! While I think I'm pretty open to the various theories of Colony Collapse Disorder, I'm not so sure that I buy the cell phone theory as the cause.  Several years ago, this theory made the rounds and was later debunked by scientists as complete hogwash.  But now there appears to be a new cell phone/CCD theory making the rounds thanks to Dr. Daniel Favre who previously worked as a biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  Now he claims that his study shows that an active cellular phone disturbs bees.  The reason I don't necessarily buy it is because in my years of working in radio and television broadcasting, I've noticed that some insects like wasps and hornets seem to be attracted to the signals emitted from transmitters.  While I'm not a broadcasting engineer, my own eyes have spotted countless wasp and hornet nests around the "dog houses" that encase AM/FM/TV transmitters and antenna equipment.  Even a good friend of mine, who is a broadcast engineer, said that he's noticed throughout his career how they're attracted to the signals.  And even though cellular signals are different than AM/FM/TV broadcast signals, I just don't believe that cell phones are driving bees away from their hives.  For right now, I lean towards the chemical poisoning theory and believe that bees are bringing something home (which they share) and that causes the bees to leave and forget how to find their way back.  But of course, I could be wrong.  Anyway, now that I've finished my stand on the soapbox, now its your turn to read the article and decide for yourself.  The article appeared in "The Daily Mail" (United Kingdom) with reader comments afterward.  Be prepared, many of those that posted their own comments aren't buying the theory either. -Mark

Why a mobile phone ring may make bees buzz off: Insects infuriated by handset signals
By David Derbyshire

Signals from mobile phones could be partly to blame for the mysterious deaths of honeybees, new research shows.

In the first experiment of its kind, a bee expert placed a mobile phone underneath a hive and then carefully monitored the reaction of the workers.

The bees were able to tell when the handsets were making and receiving calls, and responded by making the high pitched squeaks that usually signal the start of swarming.

Dr Daniel Favre, who carried out the experiment, believes signals from mobile phones and masts could be contributing to the decline of honeybees and called for more research.

But British bee experts say there is still no evidence that mobile phones posed a risk.

They blame the vanishing honeybees on changes in farming, the decline of wild flowers and pesticides.

The number of honeybees in the UK has halved in the last 25 years while in America bees have been badly hit by 'colony collapse disorder' - the sudden disappearance of entire colonies over winter.

Experts say bees have been badly hit by the varroa mite, a blood-sucking parasite that makes colonies vulnerable to disease, freak weather or poisoning.

Some experts say the latest generation of pesticides may disrupt the nervous systems of bees, causing them to get lost and confused.

And most bee experts say the creatures are suffering from the loss of wild flowers, meadows, rough pasture and untidy gardens.

However, a handful of experts say mobile phones could also be partly to blame.

Dr Favre, a teacher who previously worked as a biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said: 'This study shows that the presence of an active mobile phone disturbs bees - and has a dramatic effect.'

He placed two mobile phones under a beehive and recorded the high pitched calls made by the bees when the handsets were switched off, placed on stand-by and activated.

Around 20 to 40 minutes after the phones were activated, the bees began to emit "piping" calls - a series of high pitched squeaks that announce the start of swarming.

Within two minutes of the phone call ending, the worker bees calmed down.

In the study, the bees did not swarm - even after 20 hours' exposure to mobile phone signals. However, the onset of unexpected swarming triggered by mobile phone signals could have 'dramatic consequences in terms of colony losses', Dr Favre reports in the bee keeping journal Apidologie.

The study did not show that mobile phones were deadly for bees, he said.

"But one hypothesis is that electromagnetic fields could be contributing to the disappearance of bee colonies around the world," he added.

But British bee expert Norman Carreck of Sussex University said: 'It's an interesting study but it doesn't prove that mobile phones are responsible for colony collapse disorder. If you physically knock a hive, or open one up to examine it, it has the same result.

'And in America many cases of colony collapse disorder have taken place in remote areas far from any mobile phone signals.'

You can read reader reactions here.

Has science really solved the mysteries of Colony Collapse Disorder?

(Mark's Note: While this is promising news that there may be a breakthrough in Colony Collapse Disorder research, the news comes with a bit of controversy. Since the news broke in the last few days, there has been finger-pointing and eye-rolling in the scientific community already. I present this to you as what is being reported by the American media outlets. Whether the findings are accurate or not, I believe that the media focus on the endangered honey bee and the plight of beekeepers is extremely important to this cause.)

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery
Kirk Johnson
The New York Times
October 6, 2010

It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines.

But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own.

“Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team.

Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor.

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.

Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.

The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.

But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.

Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.

The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.

Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role.

They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.

Bees win in court: Judge pulls pesticide from shelves.

This is a few days old, but it is such a dramatic victory for the honeybees, I wanted to share it.

Big Win for Bees: Judge Pulls Pesticide

Bee toxic Movento pulled from market for proper evaluation


NEW YORK – A pesticide that could be dangerously toxic to America’s honey bees must be pulled from store shelves as a result of a suit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Xerces Society. In an order issued last week, a federal court in New York invalidated EPA’s approval of the pesticide spirotetramat (manufactured by Bayer CropScience under the trade names Movento and Ultor) and ordered the agency to reevaluate the chemical in compliance with the law. The court’s order goes into effect on January 15, 2010, and makes future sales of Movento illegal in the United States .


“This sends EPA and Bayer back to the drawing board to reconsider the potential harm to bees caused by this new pesticide,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally, but argued that its violations of the law should have no consequences. The Court disagreed and ordered the pesticide to be taken off the market until it has been properly evaluated. Bayer should not be permitted to run what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on bees across the country without full consideration of the consequences.”


In June 2008, EPA approved Movento for nationwide use on hundreds of different crops, including apples, pears, peaches, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, strawberries, almonds, and spinach. The approval process went forward without the advance notice and opportunity for public comment that is required by federal law and EPA’s own regulations. In addition, EPA failed to evaluate fully the potential damage to the nation’s already beleaguered bee populations or conduct the required analysis of the pesticide’s economic, environmental, and social costs.

Beekeepers and scientists have expressed concern over Movento’s potential impact on beneficial insects such as honey bees. The pesticide impairs the insect’s ability to reproduce. EPA’s review of Bayer’s scientific studies found that trace residues of Movento brought back to the hive by adult bees could cause “significant mortality” and “massive perturbation” to young honeybees (larvae).


According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops grown in America . USDA also claims that one out of every three mouthfuls of food in the typical American diet has a connection to bee pollination. Yet bee colonies in the United States have seen significant declines in recent years due to a combination of stressors, almost certainly including insecticide exposure.


"This case underscores the need for us to re-examine how we evaluate the impact of pesticides and other chemicals in the environment,” said Colangelo. “In approving Movento, EPA identified but ignored potentially serious harms to bees and other pollinators. We are in the midst of a pollinator crisis, with more than a third of our colonies disappearing in recent years. Given how important these creatures are to our food supply, we simply cannot look past these sorts of problems.”


The court decision is available here.