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Honeybees vanishing across planet

I just stumbled across this article, maybe it's old news to you all, but it's frightening enough to read again and keep it from becoming just old news.

http://www.starnewsonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070409/NEWS/704090338/1039/health

The Press Release

http://aginfo.psu.edu/news/07Jan/HoneyBees.htm

Comments

To be sure the loss of bees would be catastrophic, however there is not much good evidence that cell phone use is responsible.
There is some awful weasel word in the Independent article.. "I am convinced the possibility is real." (?) a "hint" to a possible cause (?)

and as has been said elsewhere, if this were indeed the cause, it wouldn't be appearing to "spread" to well-covered-in-mobile-service areas like Britain and Continental Europe only now.
This article is worth looking at.
"...blah, blah, unclear, blah; at least we heard some guy thinks maybe."

Sorry, things may prove differently at some point, but as of now the reality is, 1) is it really happening 2) people don't know squat about why it's happening, if it is.

There was a scare about 5 years ago about declining bee population that kind of petered out, oh and 11 years ago


My question is, how many environmental stressors can we pile on top of an already-booming mass extinction event before the wheels come off? Are things going so well that we can afford to quibble about "the" cause?

The research with honeybees and geneticall engineered corn pollen showed that they managed with it okay, until they caught mites or a virus, and then it became fatal.

That tells me it's the number of stressors that overwhelm the organism, not "which factor is it."

The solution is, as a society, to not embrace every new technology that comes down the pike. For instance the disaster of genetic engineering could have been avoided. With cell phones, is the same true? Now that cell phones are ubiquitous, AND the bees are declining, what if there is a link? Are we capable of fixing it? Or are we really driving off a cliff?

"Frankly I'm having trouble holding my fudge right now." -Buckaroo Banzai


Perhaps it is a combination of systemic factors, if we are truly experiencing a complete honeybee decline. If that is the case we are royal screwed. I could see a change in particular technology to achieve different results, or even giving up of a particular technology if it was strongly linked, but if it is a combination of factors we're doomed. Cell phones from different parts of the globe use slightly different technology to achieve the same effect. Most European systems are GSM while most American systems are not. So is one a strssor and another not? Hard to say. A few things that gives me pause before sounding the klaxions is 1) this has happened before, and the populations survived and recovered, 2) the science used to support this is weak.
If there was more clarity that this was a significant cause for irrevocable decline of bee populations I would turn off and smash the phone I have right now. As it is I only marginally feel the good outweighs the bad in regards to the pernicious things anyways.

Additionally, in regards to pollination there are many other species, such as yellow jackets, and bumblebees which pollinate plants, so while I have admiration for Al Einstein I'm not so sure we should put complete faith in him regarding bio-systems.


For that matter I don't even trust Einstein on Relativity theory.


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