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Sun, 26 Aug 2007

Life Without Bees: Why The Honey Bees Are Disappearing

For the last few months, I've been hearing about the bees disappearing. A NY Times article in Feb 07 talked about 50 - 70% of bee colonies vanishing mysteriously, leaving the beekeeping industry in hard straits. Beekeepers truck their bees around the country, in search of crops to pollinate. If there aren't enough bees, many commercial crops dependent on bee pollination are in serious trouble.

According to the Xerxes Society, farmers need insect pollinators to produce many different types of marketable fruits and vegetables. Worldwide, animal pollinators are required for over 70 percent of crops, including apples, almonds, berries, melons, and sunflowers, among others. In the United States, this produce represents 15 to 30 percent of the foods and beverages we consume. Even crops that self-pollinate, such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, often produce more, larger, or higher-quality fruit when cross-pollinated by insects."

The Xerxes Society's solution to the scarcity of domesticated honey bees is to encourage wild bees as pollinators - the article discusses the ways in which farmers can support wild bee habitat. All of those methods work in conjunction with sustainable organic farming, or permaculture, where the rythms of nature are respected, and there are no pesticides and less monocropping. But most farmland in the US is devoted to industrial agriculture, which could care less about wild bees. Besides, according to one beekeeper, wild bees were all killed off by parasites in the 1980's.

The Daily Grail post on Aug. 5th couldn't come up with a reason for Collapsed Colony Syndrome, or CCS. Bees have died off before, but in restricted areas, for various reasons, including mites, or pesticide use. It's normal for up to 20% of a hive to die off in a season. But it's never happened in these numbers, or on this scale. The Daily Grail Article speculated about Radio Frequency, but commenters dismissed that idea as far fetched.

Not so Dr. George Carlo, of Safe Wireless, author of Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age. In an interview with Acres USA, in the July '07 issue (not available online), Dr. Carlo tells why wireless technology is killing the bees. In the past three years, cell phone users have grown to about three billion, which means that the atmosphere is permeated by radio waves. Bees navigate based on electomagnetic fields, and radio waves have altered the bees cellular structures so that their homing instincts are lost and they are unable to navigate.

Noise field intervention technology is available for people to block radiation from wireless devices, preventing cancer and many other nasty conditions attributed to electropollution. Unfortunately, it's not available for bees. Dr. Carlo says that if we switched from wireless to fiber optic infrastructure, minimizing broadcasting used in cell phone use, the bees would come back. Or we could give up cell phones! What a great idea! Let Dr. Carlo tell you why your cell phone is dangerous, to you as well as the bees.