One group that appears to be unhappy with the rapidly exploding population of cell phones is honeybees. According to a new study, wireless phone signals are confusing the insects to the point of death — and could be a major factor in colony collapse disorder.
The study, by researcher and biologist Daniel Favre of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is the result of 83 experiments that looked at honeybees’ reactions to nearby cell phones in off and standby modes, and when making phone calls.
Worker Piping Signal
The result is the discovery that mobile phones produce what the study called “a dramatic impact on the behavior of bees, namely by inducing the worker piping signal.” A worker piping signal tells a bee that it’s time to swarm — or that the colony has been disturbed.
Worker piping is noise made by the honeybee, and the study found that it increases 10 times when there is a phone call on a nearby device. Favre wrote that worker piping “is not frequent” naturally in a colony, and, when it happens, it could have “dramatic consequences in terms of colony losses due to unexpected swarming.”
He also said his study is the first on the potential effects of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones on honeybee behavior. A previous study in 2008 found that bees will abandon their hives if a cell phone is nearby.
Another study, from India’s Punjab University, found other kinds of deleterious effects a cell phone can have on bee populations. In that study, published last summer, researchers discovered that a cell phone near a hive resulted in a decrease in the number of eggs produced by the queen bee.
It’s not yet clear if cell phones are the major reason for colony collapse disorder. CCD is a crisis affecting the world’s bees, and…
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