I recently read an article about the (quite) sudden phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. This is called Colony collapse disorder, or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS). For most scientists it’s still a complete mystery why it is happening. Areas most affected seem to be North America and parts of Europe.
I am not going into detail on symptoms, scale & remedies. All of this is documented in extend in the Wikipedia article on CCD.
This article also mentions many possible causes, although none of them is being confirmed as the cause of CCD
However, it did surprise me that one likely cause (at least in my humble opinion) is not mentioned at all in the article: How about cell phones? Could it be that the collective radiation of cell phones and the towers that connect them mess with the bees and their (puny) brains?
I am not going to submit this to the Wikipedia article, because I am sure it has already been researched (and I guess dismissed).
Still a bit weird though… There are still plenty of rumours (whether they’re true or not, I leave to the experts) going around of cell phones causing brain cancer to people. So why not to bees as well…?
I’ll be damned… More than 3 years after I wrote this post, I came across an article on the CNN site, titled: Study links bee decline to cell phones.
So I guess this either means it took at least 3 years to research this, or that the short article I wrote in 2007 was way ahead of its time… 😎