New thought: Do you guys move your colonies around like the crop follower beekeepers do in the US?

As people walk around, the location of their cellphones change. What if the cell phone signals don't hurt the bees so much as play tricks with their navigation. The network that the bees were using to navigate is altered so the bees can't find home and they die.

A little research to correlate where the beehive was relative to the cell towers when the bees went missing would help. Tough to do historical research on individual cell phones, but should be easy to test in the field.

Do these big farms use Nextel to stay in touch?

Yes, but do you know if cell phones around the world don't always use the same frequencies? Different frequency, potentially different effects. Also, what wattage are UK towers emitting?

Of course, the official words is that it isn't happening in the UK but there reports from bee keepers of failed hives in numbers similar to what we've seen in the US. "Rumor control"?

More info on how honeybees navigate

I don't think that the problem lies with Bee Navigation, I think the issue is to do with the following;



There could be a chemical in the environment caused by GM crops which is behaving in the same way as the pheromone eythl oleate but is a much more powerful and longer lasting chemical. Bee Navigation is mostly due to the nature of plane polarized sunlight and microwaves from Cell phones are not able to re-polerize the sunlight into a different direction.

EDIT

The biochemical agrochemical industry really needs to held to account.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5631205-description.html

That doesn't answer the question of why the subject bees don't return to their hive and the dead bees aren't found in its vicinity. Also, IIRC, the bees remaining in the hive are not afflicted. Navigation seems to be a valid issue. GM crops may be a problem with bees, but not necessarily with CCD.

Actually I think this actually explains it quite nicely, if there is another chemical which is preventing the nurse bee from maturing into forager bees over a long period of time lets say by a factor of 10 then the overall effect after a period of time, say a few months especially over the winter period, would be that the foraging bees would die away naturally (there life time is 7-10 weeks) but there are no more foraging bees to fill the ranks (this is because they are still nurse bees). Additionally the energy that would have been brought back by the foraging bees has now been diminished making the situation even more critical for the hive overall. Inside the hive it would appear as normal. The nursing bees would still be tending the hive and the foraging bees would become more and more notably absent until the criticality point is reached and the hive is completely abandoned when the queen and nurse bees leave the hive.

When chemicals similar to the pheromone eythl oleate are being sprayed on GM crops to act as a defoliant. I am beginning to see a much more powerful link. By the way is the patent holder the same person who was involved in this link -

http://www.nalusda.gov/speccoll/findaids/agentorange/text/03812.pdf

Hmm US army - 1970s - defoliants - Agent Orange

EDIT

Actually the cell phone towers do use the same frequencies and the same power ranges all over the world. I used to tune the frequencies for the circulators that went into the cell base stations. These devices went into all the Cell networks base stations through the world because Semiens, Ericsson and Nokia had most of the cell base stations market even in the USA. All your cell phone providers will be using these companies for the base stations. Almost all cell networks throughout the world now use GSM and the GSM cell phones use frequencies within four different frequency bands :


850 MHz (824.2 - 848.8 MHz Tx; 869.2 - 893.8 MHz Rx)


900 MHz (880-2 - 914.8 MHz Tx; 925.2 - 959.8 MHz Rx)


1800 MHz (1710.2 - 1784.8 MHz Tx; 1805.2 - 1879.8 MHz Rx)


1900 MHz (1850.2 - 1909.8 MHz Tx; 1930.2 - 1989.8 MHz Rx)

OK, I hadn't realized that GSM had become as standardized, I thought there were still a lot of countries that had legacy networks to support the older protocals. And does everyone use all four bands? Or as some of them not utilized in some countries?

What I've read indicates the forager bees are dying away from the hive, the dead aren't being found in the hives vicinity. That tells me they got disoriented/lost. If foragers die off and then the nurse bees are forced into the forager role early (due to not being fed the pheromone) and then they die off for the same reason as the previous generation of foragers, who's left to do the nursing? The hive gets younger and younger until it cannot function.

There are lots of variables in this problem but it would seem that a controlled study should be able to varify or discount some of these hypothesis' quickly.

Someone said previously that farmers aren't really dependent on foreign honeybees for their crops because there are wild bees that will do the job.

Yes there are working wild bees, but you have to make some effort to keep them around to be there to pollinate the crops when the crops need pollinating. Farmers have done their absolute best to wipe out food sources and habitat for useful wild insects. If you've ever traveled through farm country consisting of many 1000-acre single-crop farms, you don't see much in the way of native habitat, do you? So where are the native bees supposed to come from when they're expected to take over the duties of the honeybees?

My next question: Everyone is concentrating on what is happening to the honeybees. Is anyone checking out the wild bees? Is the source of the problem affecting the wild bees, too?

By the way, the problem isn't happening (or very much) in England, so one might suspect that cell phones are not the problem.

We tamper with Nature at our own risk. Nature doesn't care whether we exist or not.

By the way, people would do well to remember that all religions ---EVERY SINGLE ONE --- are manmade.

Susan, I just can't resist...

If humans "tamper with Nature at our own risk" but at the same time you insinuate that humans are just another part of nature, nothing more, then how can we tamper with it?

By your definition, whatever we do is always "natural". Does a beaver tamper with nature when he builds a dam?