Bees in danger. Cell phones to be blamed.

pranking Moe's bar again.

Alarming study led by researcher Daniel Favre found that bees reacted pretty radically in the presence of cell phones placed in vicinity of their hives. The bees seem to have sensed the signals transmitted when the phone rang, and they also produced a heavy buzzing noise during the calls. The frequency of calls seems to have confused bees into a state of erratic flight patterns, and, as study demonstrated, their buzzing sounds increased ten-fold when the phones were in call or ringing mode, but remained normal when they were not in use.

“It is apparent that cell phone signals cause bees to become lost and disoriented, and sometimes to assemble into a swarm. A minute or so after the phones are shut off, everything seems to go back to normal”, said Dr. Daniel Favre. 

Popularization and acceptance of mobile phones as a personal device for the last fifteen years is largely coinciding with the huge decline of bee populations in the northern hemisphere.

Why should we be alarmed?

Bees are a major pollinator. In the U.S. alone they are responsible for 30% of the food production. Bee populations dropped 17% in the UK last year, according to the British Bee Association, and nearly 30 percent in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Andrew Goldsworthy, a biologist from the UK's Imperial College, London, has studied the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He thinks too that it’s possible bees could be affected by cell phone radiation.

The reason, Goldsworthy says, could be associated with a pigment in bees called cryptochrome.

Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation.

They use it to sense the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from cell phones and their base stations. Due to this factor bees have hard time finding their way home.

Goldsworthy has written to the UK communications regulator, suggesting that a change of phone frequencies could stop this confusion that bees experience.