Liberals have blamed the epidemic of honeybee deaths around the world on just about everything: global warming, pollution, Paul Ryan’s budget…
Now it turns out it’s all caused by the proliferation of cell phone signals.
Inhabit.com has the apian information:
Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones may be to blame. Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also may lead to their death. Over 83 experiments have yielded the same results. With virtually most of the population of the United States (and the rest of the world) owning cell phones, the impact has been greatly noticeable.
What’s a good liberal to do? On one hand they want to give everyone free government cell phones from Safelink. On the other hand, cell phones are killing the honeybees.
That sound you hear is liberal heads exploding across the fruited plain.
H/T: Warren
Source: Inhabitat.com
This post was last modified on January 26, 2021
View Comments (17)
The dip in the bee population occurred just about the time lawyers were allowed to sue bee keepers on behalf of anyone with an allergy stung within flight distance of a privately owned hive. They don't have to prove that the bee doing the stinging came from that hive. This shut down several bee keepers in my town.
Just sayin.
It is about time they put transponders on those privately owned bees, anyway! Letting them buzz about all willinilly like that is just irresponsible! They should be forced to buy insurance for those little suckers, like the rest of us... Oh, wait... Nevermind.
Not too many decades ago, a big story in the news involved a huge gang of barbaric, vicious bees that called themselves Africanized. More recently the story has evolved but somehow the correlation to the good bees croaking off and the indictment of their Africanized cousins remains less useful for our media in general.
The Africanized colonies are killing off the 'other' bees because the Africanized bees are given advanced cell phone technology before anyone else and are thus able to coordinate their take over of the entire human population through starvation.
A vast left wing conspiracy. Apparently this one might work!
This is crap. There have been other bee die-offs in the past including (IIRC) late-19th Century America. (Unless it was the telegraph signals???)
Yes, but was it man caused, that's the only important thing you need to take away from that data! AGW! AGW! AGW! AGW! Choo-choo! Whistling down the ol' storm drain!
I read the article last week. They put the cell phones IN the hives with the bees while switched ON. I'm guessing the bees all died trying to attack the invader that was making all the noise. It must be the cell signals. Only a liberal would come to that conclusion.
The whole thing's bogus.
If cell signals would kill bees, there'd be a circle of death around every cell tower, which has the same signals amplified many times over. The fact that there isn't speaks volumes about this particular piece of bullshit.
As with AGW, Lysenkoism, pure & simple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
The signals don't directly kill the bees. They posit that they scramble their navigation and swarming signals, right? They become unable to locate the hive, or are given false signal to abandon it. Other studies have already indicated dead zones around cell towers (in fact towers may have been suspected first).
There's nothing immediately outlandish about these propositions: nearly all creatures are sensitive to some portion of EM spectrum. Undoubtedly some bees will be forced to adapt
I never noticed a drop in my bee colonies near cell towers -- usually I lost my bees to varroa. Ever since I got out of it (thank God, although I *do* miss comb honey) I keep up with things from my neighbor, who keeps a couple hundred hives. He says varroa and mites are the same problems -- and worries less about AHB than those two issues.
If you really want to know what kills all the honeybees? Well first off, a.mellifera comes from Europe -- it is not native, and it obliterated the native bees in the US. They thrived on European crops like clover and alfalfa. Problem is, few farmers grow clover now (fewer dairy farms...) and the ones that do bale it & alfalfa up before it blooms, as that's when it has the most nutritional value.
If you reduce the food source by some 95% as in where I live, I would think that a decrease in bee population would be inevitable.
This is one of those issues where an overall decrease in the bee population is somehow linked to cell phone use without accounting for habitat and other factors. Face it, it's sexier to blame cellphones than it is to actually go looking for the cause. Junk science supporting the cause du jour. Lysenko would be proud.
Touche sir. I cannot retaliate in a credible way without countless hours of research or actual beehive ownership, neither of which i'm inclined to engage in.. (though lysenkoism seems a tad harsh). I'll let it perculate. At any rate, our phones are safe from confiscation, and clever engineers will craft an artificial pollinator in a decade or two if that becomes a problem. Poor bees though..
There are other, far more serious issues facing beekeepers these days -- for example, Bt corn, and the heavy use of pesticides for our government mandated minimum tillage farming methods.
How are they conducting these 'so called' experiments in Switzerland? I didn't think we had made any cell phones small enough to strap on to bees yet, let alone teach them how to use them or text message their hives on where to find the best flower patches to make honey with!
Soon cell phones will be outlawed and we'll be back to using smoke signals, carving rocks and banging drums for long distance communication. You know like they do in Washington DC right now.
but then the smoke signals would be banned for hurting mother gaia. We just cannot win.
Liberalism = why the smell of flatulence emanates from a flower-child worldview!
Cell phones confuse bees? I guess they're gonna hafta go back to landlines.
The libs will want to pass a law that makes it illegal for bees to be texting while flying.