Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER - TALKS & REPORTS => Topic started by: Understudy on April 20, 2007, 08:50:15 am
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http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=2952812&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1 (http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=2952812&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1)
Sincerely,
Brendhan
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Yah a huge hole in the Cell Phone theory is, when bees get lost, they tend to give up and find another hive.
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This is the most alarming sentence, I think
"Hayes doubts it's what's causing nearly half of America's bees to just disappear, but his team at the FDA is checking into it anyway." That's a shocking statement. I agree on everything about "What if it were Cattle, Pigs, Dogs, Cats, etc., then someone would pay more attention - but the rest of the article misses the point. I wonder which lobbyists are blaming the phones, and not the towers, where the problem surely could from?
I think this story FULLY missed the point. I don't think CELLPHONES are the problems (if indeed cell usage is related) but CELL TOWERS and all the other myriad of antenna they carry on them. Satellite dishes, yagi antenna, multiband re-transmitters, microwave and on and on. Unless you've been shocked by radio RF signal (34 years as a ham operator) from even relatively low wattage systems, you probably think it is BS - it is not, radio RF signals bombard us MORE TODAY then ever before, the only reason we don't seem to notice is because they are out of our AUDIBLE frequency - trust me, if you could HEAR all the RF signals, you surely would go insane!
I stand on my back porch roof and I can see 5 (FIVE) cell towers in less than two miles in all directions, THAT is an enormous change from just 5 years ago when only one was erected.
So (if anything) put your cellphones back to your ear while your driving doing 60 in a 40 zone, your not hurting the bees, you're endangering your neighbors - but even-though cell towers are wide spread, just listen to Verizon and Cingular boast about their NATION WIDE COVERAGE - they keep detailed maps of locations (which belongs to who) pretty close lipped. Sorry to say that cellphone has very short range and so anywhere a road is, a tower is today.
I am not on the cell tower bandwagon here, but that article really missed the point - bees aren't coming into contact with cellphones, they are navigating through tower-zones though. That is what the article should have been about. And if they want to waste money on experiments, STOP putting your cellphones in bee-hives and calling that "Science and research", get out the check book and do some real homework.
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Beemaster: That made a whole lot of sense, but I'm sure the cell phone will make a difference in the hive eventually. A while back people realized that cell phones increase the risk of having tumors in the brain and hand of whatever side they use by 40%. Supposedly they made them "safer" but I haven't herd anything recently about this. I refuse to ever get a cell phone or use one for anything more than emergency purposes.
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So he put a cell phone in a hive... that's funny, I wish he posted the number for it. I'd love to call my bees on the phone.
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Cell phones and cell phones have been around for a while. If they are the cause then bees would disappear when you hived them. Also the RF radiation from cell towers is lower than other sources such as radios and TVs. Whether or not cell phones cause cancer, most studies have shown that cell phones do not cause cancer. It got a lot of press when a man filled a lawsuit when his wife died from brain cancer (he lost due to the lack of proof.)
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The claim that cell phones are the cause is easily disproven by the fact that the collapse began in isolated pockets, then progressed state-to-state. Had cell phones been the cause, the collapses would have appeared everywhere simultaneously.
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I am not a supporter of the Cell Phone theory. I don't know much about the other cell phone providers but the company I work for builds and maintains Nextel sites. I have talked to the Nextel techs about the cell phone theory and found out one interesting fact. Within the past few years Nextel has begun to use a system that allows the tower to control the handsets RF output. In other words when you are near a site the "tower" tells your handset to put out a small signal. When you are far away from the site the tower tells your handset to put out a larger signal. So one could see that a few years ago there was a lot more RF floating around out there when the phones just transmitted at full power all the time. (this is also why you get better battery time now then before) A second observation I have noted is that There a lot of old AT&T sites out there that are no longer in use. One recently that I was at was a 300 foot tower which had 6 or 8 25 foot microwave dishes on it as well as various other radio equipment. The building that housed the equipment for at&t was two stories high and probably about 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. This would have been full of equipment in its day. Now days these huge sites are condensed to a 20' by 40' shelter and most of the traffic is sent through fiber optics or a single ISM shot rather then 6 - 25' dishes. Just another downgrade in the amount of RF out there. I am of course no expert and I may be completely wrong, these are just a few observations of mine.