Oh Oh, CellPhones Killing off Bees

The study did not show that mobile phones were deadly for bees, he said. British bee expert Norman Carreck of Sussex University said: 'It's an interesting study but it doesn't prove that mobile phones are responsible for colony collapse disorder. If you physically knock a hive, or open one up to examine it, it has the same result.

'And in America many cases of colony collapse disorder have taken place in remote areas far from any mobile phone signals.'

Once again, the media is going bonkers over a bee paper, and making claims way out of proportion to any actual results. Here are some sample headlines:
Cellphones cause bees to swarm and die
Phone signals confuse bees and cause them to fly erratically before suddenly dying
It’s official–cell phones are killing bees
When you look at the actual paper, you notice two things immediately:

1. There were NO dying bees. At all.

Seriously, the words ‘die’, ‘killed’, and ‘dying’ don’t even occur in the paper.

2. The design of the experiments are questionable; the results are kinda interesting, but they are not linked to CCD in any way, shape, or form.

Like earlier papers that caused a big kerfuffle in the media, when you actually examine the research you find that there are some serious methodology questions. And a lot of distortion of the results. It’s reporting by press release.

Let’s pick this paper apart and look at why it is not the Beepocalypse that some media have claimed.
Even though the phones were–literally–on top of the hive, it wasn’t until they had been transmitting for over 30 minutes before an effect was recorded. The effect was that the bees began piping (a really cool rhythmic buzzy sound). It is true that piping bees are related to swarms; however, bees pipe for a lot of other reasons too. If you bump into a hive, bees will pipe. It’s something they do when they are disturbed.

It’s important to note that no alteration of behavior (swarming or otherwise) other than piping was actually observed, even after 20 hours of exposure to active mobile phone headsets. The swarming and dying part was completely made up.

The immediate critique that occurs to me is that a cell phone transmitting for over an hour will heat up. If a hot, noisy object is on top of a bee hive, I think it is reasonable to expect the bees to react. That effect may have no relationship with cell phone transmission or magnetic fields at all.

It is, frankly, difficult for me to say much about this paper besides negative things, because it is entirely made up of un-replicated experiments. It was a “pilot study”. As a reviewer, I would not have approved this paper in it’s present form, simply because it is so difficult to figure out just what the methodology was!!

I can’t even say how often the piping occurred because no statistics are presented.