The Big Bee Story

This report on the possible connection between cell phones usage and the drastic dying off of honey bee hives might turn out to be the big story of 2007. It will be interesting to see what happens to the stock of phone companies and food producers in the next few weeks. Honey bees are important for a lot more than pollinating flowers.

Quoting from ebeehoney.com I see that:
Almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon and many other crops all rely on honey bees for pollination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination.

Of course if this bee / electricity connection is proven, then it will put a lot of other human animal interactions in sharper focus. If our electrical and radio emissions are so harmful to bees why would they not be as equally damaging to sharks, whales, tadpoles, spiders and young children?

If this really is an electrical phenomena, then the bees should be surviving better in places like Alberta where there there is a relatively lower intensity of cell phones. (Alberta is the third biggest honey producer in North America). Many of the hives in the north are transported south to coastal BC each fall and returned in the spring. In addition thousands of queen bees are imported each spring from California. All this points to yet another extreme example of world reliance on species monoculture. (The photo shows one of the vast Alberta canola fields that are pollinated by bees).

As I have written elsewhere, it is simply not enough to save the baby seals. The earth is a global system and once mankind started tinkering with one species in isolation they became responsible for the whole shebang.

[April 18, 2007 Update: Here is an interesting relevant article.]