I thought this was a bit far out, but in reading the article, it might have a little bit of credibility. As it says in the article, Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, man would starve to death in 4 years.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

The Bees will disappear in 2008, with humans dieing off 4 years later in 2012.

My wife has been reading about this for a few months now. Since we have edible landscaping she too has mentioned fewer bees seem to be in our garden.

At this time neither of our kids (14 and 11) have their own cell phone.

Pesticides are another culprit.

Organic greeny types have a HUGE argument here.

Herb

Herb-
Very true. We try and buy organic as much as possible. We also use many organic or self made organic products in our home. Having chickens in our backyard provides lots of fertilizer for our small urban plot.

I never thought about European honey bees not being native to the US, until they started disappearing. Now I'm seeing more bumblebees around. I wonder if honey bees edge out other pollinators.

A caller to Dr. Bill Wattenberg's show brought up this issue on yesterday's program. Dr. Wattenberg was very skeptical because bees have lived in environments with varying levels of radio freuency energy for many years, yet these effects hadn't been noted before. If cellular phone handsets cause bees to become disoriented, then why hasn't a similar phenomenon been noted when bees are in the presence of CB radios, communications/microwave towers, broadcast radio/television towers, satellite uplinks, amateur radio antennas, walkie-talkies, etc? As Dr. Wattenberg pointed out, even if the bees are most sensitive to frequencies used by cell phone handsets, this problem would have existed 20, 30, or even 50 years ago because those frequencies were used for other things then.

Alfredo- Could it be the sheer volume of cell phone users?

I just checked my apple trees, and see many smaller (wild?) bees, I may build a few bee houses, to encourage the bee population.

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/wildlife/wabees.asp

Einstein may be wrong! in many areas, wildbirds, such as Lories are the major pollinators.

I read somewhere that the Varroa and Tracheal Mites are the major killers of honey-bees.

Don't forget how important butterflies are too.

I should think it would be reasonably easy to pin this cell phone thing down. There are places in the world where there is little cell phone activity, or possibly even none. They could overlay a map of the bee degeneration with one of cell phone activity and get a good idea if there was a correlation.

I too wonder about the fact we've had RF radiation for decades without a problem. Is there something about the cell phone setup that is different?

Could there be a bee disease that's spreading?

Could these just be Democrat bees who have lost their way?

LOL. Maybe Douglas Adams just had the wrong species. " So long and thanks for all the flowers." And with Jackie Robinson's #42 being retired - dude - it's over.

Don't forget your towel!

The good news is that we will have a neat interuniverse hiway soon.

Just imagine how small those phones must be for the bees to carry them around.

How about "cell phones ont kill,people with cell phones kill".