Forget About Biotech Crops in Bee Disappeances—It's Cellphones!

Last week, I analyzed the Sierra Club scare campaign that suggests that biotech crops might be responsible for colony collapse disorder in which bees are disappearing around the world. Now the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, is reporting that another high tech culprit could be responsible--mobile phones. No, really they are! To wit:

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… Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left"…

Now 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."

One problem with the biotech crop theory is that bees are also disappearing in Europe which plants very little in the way of biotech crops. Of course, Europe is chock-a-block with mobile phones. But why now? It's not as though cellphones have just started emitting bee-confusing radio waves in the last year.

Tuskegee University biologist C.S. Prakash wryly notes: As Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Anyway, whole Independent article here.

Kudos to Prakash.