For those of us alarmed by the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder that has wiped out swathes of the American, and now European, honey bee population, here’s a new potential cause: cell phones.
The evidence so far, though, seems slim. Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross write in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday that “German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.” Now, they say:
a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: “I am convinced the possibility is real.”
That ‘hint’ and ‘possibility’ leave us, unfortunately, still a long way from knowing what’s really been going on.
EarthQuaker 