More Anti-Technology Hysteria

The big headline on Drudge: Are Cellphones Wiping Out Our Bees?

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

Certainly if honeybees suddenly disappeared, some crops would suffer, but there's no indication that a worldwide famine would result, as pointed out by Steven Den Beste in an email to Instapundit:

The claims in that article about cellphones and bees sound like the global warming hysteria, up to and including the predictions of apocalypse.

For instance, there was this claim: "Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees."

That's wrong. Corn, wheat, rice, rye, barley, and all the other grain crops do not rely on insects for pollination, and they make up the majority of the calories consumed by the human race.

There have been manmade sources of electronic radiation for decades, dating back to early radios and later various forms of radar. Cellphones have been around in one form or another (from the early briefcase-sized models to today's tiny phones) for at least 20 years. Why would bees survive the much more powerful signals of those devices, and 20 years of cellphones, suddenly be thrown in a dither?

This story sounds to me like some scientists have decided to back into an explanation for the disappearance of bees by identifying a manmade technology and alleging a totally unprovable theory of how that technology is causing the problem. Could it be true? I suppose it's remotely possible that some sort of manmade electronic emission is messing with their navigation ability, but why now when that technology has been around for so long? And even if it was, what could you do about it? Ban all cellphones?

This could well be part of a larger war on handheld devices by those who are convinced that they cause brain tumors or other brain malfunctions. Some scientists have become quite upset that their governments have refused to heed their warnings on cellphone radiation, and perhaps this is their way of ratcheting up the argument.

I know I've missed a turn or two while talking on a cellphone. Who's to say the bees aren't having the same problem?

UPDATE: This guy seems to know a thing or two about bees and cellphones:

Most important, bees navigate primarily via polarized light, which is in a completely different part of the EM spectrum from radio waves. How radio waves could possibly impact their use of light for navigation (any more than it does humans' use of light for navigation) is at best nonintuitive, so I would never believe it until I saw the published paper showing me the evidence. I am not holding my breath for that paper to appear.