Scientists at the Landau University of Koblenz, Germany, discovered that radiation from cell phones can disorient bees, stop their ability to communicate with each other, and lead to the collapse of their colonies:
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
And cell phones may be the culprit:
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.
Why is this serious? Because we depend on bees for our crops:
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece - Thanks Shara!
Also, honeybees only make up for -one third- of pollination in the united states. We're not going to be in much trouble if every honeybee were to die off tomorrow.
Most internet "wisdom" is attributed to either Einstein (if it's pseudoscience) or the Dalai Lama (if it's pseudospritual).
--Albert Einstein
http://agbi.uni-landau.de/material_download/IAAS_2006.pdf
It seems to me that the study is so small(I think they only used 8 bee hives, and I think he says some of them weren't recorded correctly) that a new study should be done using realistic approaches. From what I understand, they took cordless phone base stations and pumped them to full blast and then put them right under or in the bee hive.
Anyways this study smells a little fishy to me, but I think another larger scale study should be done.
The article goes on to mention about the increasing evidence that cell phones are harmful to humans, but all the articles and studies I've seen have discounted this.
It's clear there is a problem here, but the solution seems unclear. I'm more inclined to think it could be some pesticide that is widely used, than cell phone radiation... Then again, I'm not a bee expert.