Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

There’s been a lot of news recently about a sudden decline in the honeybee population.  Apparently beekeepers and agriculturalists are finding hives mysteriously abandoned at levels never seen before.  This is Extremely Bad, as honeybee pollination is a critical first step when creating many of modern society’s staple foods.  Fruit, for instance.  So, fewer bees means less pollination, which translates to less food, which is a very bad situation for the increasingly obese western world to be in.

The theory that’s getting a lot of play in the press is that radiation from cell phones is somehow disrupting the bees’ return to the hive.  It’s not as implausible as it sounds.  Many animals rely very heavily on information sampled directly from the surrounding environment with no “thinking” done in between the sensing and the acting, especially if the animal in question has a brain the size of a small booger.  So bees don’t do much thinking about their environments, choosing instead to trust that the world around them is following the same rules that it was when the bees evolved.

Generally speaking, bees are amazing navigators.  They are capable of remembering the precise location of a specific flower from miles away.  They can do this because they have many ways of assembling a usable picture of the world, one of which is their attunement to Earth’s magnetic field.  This is where the “cell phone radiation” theory comes in.  We know that bees are magnetically sensitive, and perhaps cellular towers are screwing up the radar, so to speak.  It’s possible, certainly.  Have you ever heard the expression, “Like a moth to a flame?”  Moths fly into flames precisely because our technological advancements (candles, in this case) interfere with the moth’s very simple navigational rules (keep the source of bright light above you).

Still, I don’t think this is enough to explain mass extinction.  First, the role of magnetism in a bee’s life is not well understood.  Evidence suggests that it might just be a time keeping device, contributing very little to navigation.  Secondly, why would cellular transmissions hit critical mass now?  Shouldn’t we have seen this effect several years ago when the cell phone companies were adding hundreds of transmission towers to get their networks up and running?  Lastly and most fundamentally, you’ve got to remember that perception is redundant.  When you (or a bee) perceives the world, you are drawing information from many different sources.  Each source reinforces the other.  In a normal environment it is almost impossible for you to make a massive perceptual error.  It is unlikely that magnetic disruption could so completely wreck a bee’s ability to get back to its hive.  Something bad is going on with the world’s bee population, but I don’t think Sprint is to blame.