Are mobile phones killing the world's bees?

Are mobile phones killing the world’s bees?

By David Sheets

St Louis Post-Dispatch Talking Tech blog

04/16/2007 3:47 pm

Beekeepers are worried. Their bees are disappearing.

That is, they are flying off to find food and losing their way back to the hive.

Exactly why this is happening is not certain, but bee populations have shrunk in the United States and are decreasing in Europe as a result.

Now, a theory developed at Landau University in Germany presents a possible answer: The bees react adversely to mobile phone transmissions.

According to the institution’s research, bees suffer from acute navigational difficulties when they fly near mobile phones and cellular transmission towers. The electromagnetic radiation emitted from phones and towers possibly interfere with the bees’ own innate directional controls, preventing the bees from finding their way home if they stray too far from their hives.

Beekeepers say the bees are not dying near the hives, and such potential bee killers as parasites, pollution, pesticides and global warming would leave just as many dead bees around hives as live ones.

More than 70 percent of the bee population in the eastern United States has vanished over the past couple of years; out West, the decline is closer to 60 percent. This year, comparable patterns in declining bee populations are showing up across Europe.

Meanwhile, mobile phone use continues to expand — even many children under age 10 have them — and cellular service providers are speeding up construction of signal towers and relay stations to meet demand.

The loss of bees threatens world crops, as nothing else pollinates young fruit and vegetable plants as effectively as bees.

Again, Talking Tech stresses that the connection between missing bees and mobile phone use is theoretical. Research also continues on whether the phones also increase cancer risk, kill brain cells, even lower sperm counts. To date, no definitive relationship exists between mobile phones and these ailments.