Are Electromagnetic Signals To Blame?

Millions of Bees Die - Are Electromagnetic Signals To Blame?

March 06, 2007

Bees in the US are dying of some unknown cause - millions of them are leaving their hives and do not come back. What is happening? The problem has got a name - colony collapse disorder - but no apparent cause.

Some years back, France and other European countries had a similar, if less severe die-off of honey bees. At the time Gaucho, a poisonous seed treatment chemical produced by Bayer, was blamed, the die-off has continued in Europe, although at a comparatively slower pace.
The situation in the US seems even more severe than what happened in Europe, and certainly the onset is more sudden. According to The Independent, millions of honey bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die, leaving beekeepers facing ruin and US agriculture under threat.

"Across the country, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, honey bee colonies have started to die off, abruptly and decisively. Millions of bees are abandoning their hives and flying off to die (they cannot survive as a colony without the queen, who is always left behind).
Some beekeepers, especially those with big portable apiaries, or bee farms, which are used for large-scale pollination of fruit and vegetable crops, are facing commercial ruin - and there is a growing threat that America's agriculture may be struck a mortal blow by the loss of the pollinators. Yet scientists investigating the problem have no idea what is causing it."

On one of my weekly news grabs, I linked an article on the mysterious die-off of honey bees, and a reader commented, suggesting that emissions of GWEN, the Ground Wave Emergency Network, might be to blame. Here is what he had to say:

After reading several articles on the disappearance of the honeybee, the thought occurred that this appears to be happening only in the US. A Google search turned up nothing on this phenomenon in any other country, including Canada and Mexico.
Why only the US? Also, why are nonsensical excuses being offered up by the pseudo-scientific community for the demise of the bee?
Researchers have dubbed the syndrome the "colony collapse disorder." They say the bees presumably are dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or disoriented and eventually dying from exposure to the cold. Or, it could just be that the bees are stressed out. Give me a break!
Tired bees? Dying from weather exposure? Stressed out bees? Disoriented?
Just imagine a tired bee for a moment. When’s the last time you saw a tired bee?

Dying from weather exposure? Weather cold enough to kill bees in their hives would also decimate other insect populations. No report on that, huh?

Stressed out bees? What, all of a sudden bees get stressed out? What about bees in other countries? They don’t seem to be having a problem at all.

Disoriented bees? Ah, well this is a possibility. But what would make them disoriented? Perhaps it is the 250 HZ signals being pumped out of GWEN stations all over America. This signal makes people angry, so that they support the administrations idea of going after Iran and violence in general. It works great for mass manipulation of opinion. Unfortunately, the same signal will induce a misdirection of up to 10 degrees in the navigation ability of the honeybee. They go away from the hive and never come back because they can no longer find it. That’s why it’s only happening in the US.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this is that US media has never ventured to question why it is only happening here. Somebody must have told them to clam up on this issue or the current crop of US reporters got their degrees in journalism out of a Cracker Jack box.

Now what the hell are GWEN stations, you might want to ask, and what could they have to do with the catastrophic die-off of honey bees...

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GWEN, Microwave Arrays and Mobile Phone Radiation


GWEN, the Ground Wave Emergency Network, is a military communications network, consisting of some 300 transmitters dotting the whole of the continental United States. Each tower is 300-500 feet high. The stations are from 200 to 250 miles apart, so that a signal can go from coast to coast from one station to another. The official purpose is "to ensure adequate communication between command authorities and land-based strategic nuclear forces in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States mainland." But others say a hidden use of the system may be "electromagnetic mind-altering technology" by the use of ELF or Extremely Low Frequency waves.

According to a 1982 Air Force review of biotechnology, ELF has a number of potential military uses, including "dealing with terrorist groups, crowd control, controlling breaches of security at military installations, and antipersonnel techniques in tactical warfare." The same report states:

"Electromagnetic systems would be used to produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation. They are silent, and counter-measures to them may be difficult to develop."

Robert O. Becker, M.D., in his book "Crosscurrents: The Perils of Electropollution" said:

"GWEN is a superb system, in combination with cyclotron resonance, for producing behavioral alterations in the civilian population. The average strength of the steady geomagnetic field varies from place to place across the United States. Therefore, if one wished to resonate a specific ion in living things in a specific locality, one would require a specific frequency for that location. The spacing of GWEN transmitters 200 miles apart across the United States would allow such specific frequencies to be 'tailored' to the geomagnetic-field strength in each GWEN area."

The bees seem to be playing the role that canary birds had in the mines, warning us of impending desaster. Are these insects, by their unprecedented behavior of flying off without returning to their hives, showing that something insidious is going on?

According to a message from Paul Doyon, electromagnetic waves may well have the capacity of disorienting not only bees but a number of flying creatures. Here is a specific instance involving bees he quotes:

At Cornell Univ. honeybees in a hive relocated into a new building became disoriented. After extensive research ruled out other causes, someone noticed the hive was next to the building's electric transformer. The bees were confused by 60 hz magnetism strong enough to interfere with homing and communication to gather nectar and pollen. (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/RofD4.html)

In Germany, a study of honeybees irradiated with DECT mobile phone base station radiation found that only few of the irradiated bees returned to the hive, and that they required more time to return than the non irradiated bees. Also, the weight of the honeycombs of the irradiated bees was found to be smaller than those in the hives of non irradiated bees. (Stever H, Kuhn J, Otten C, Wunder B, Harst W. Verhaltensaenderung unter elektromagnetischer Exposition. Pilotstudie. Institut fuer Mathematik. Arbeitsgruppe Bildungsinformatik. Universitaet Koblenz-Landau; 2005. http://agbi.uni-landau.de/materialien.htm)

See also

www.mikrowellensmog.info/bienen.html Bees die from microwave irradiation - German site of Dr. Ferdinand Ruzicka, University professor.

and

http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/ouruhia/ Ouruhia Web, a New Zealand electromagnetic waves website.

and

Firstenberg, A. 1997: Microwaving Our Planet: The Environmental Impact of the Wireless Revolution. Cellular Phone Taskforce. Brooklyn, NY 11210.

See also Alfonso Balmori on EMFacts.

Other indications put together by Doyon about the effects suffered not only by bees but also birds and farm animals from the effects of cell phone radiation:

The effects of EMR are being felt by wildlife and the environment as a whole, Birds, bees, worms, trees are all being affected. We need to fight for not only the future of mankind but for the future of the whole environment.

Vienna physicians are displaying information posters in doctor's surgeries. They state radiation from mobile phones is far from being harmless as they have been told by the cell phone companies. They have therefore, in order to act responsibly, the Chamber of Doctors in Vienna, Austria, has decided to inform people about potential medical risks.

http://www.mast-victims.org/

His findings, and subsequent related work by Dr Cyril Smith (Smith and Baker, 1982), seem relevant also to the earlier and more generally accepted studies on bees and homing pigeons, both of which are known to have receptors which are able to sense the Earth's magnetic field and its variations, which they use to help direct their survival behavior. My own extraordinary first experience of complete disorientation below the lines may also be relevant; I had never experienced this before, though I have done so since, most notably after I had held up a fluorescent tube for over an hour, to be photographed under the lines; the next day, after a distressingly sleepless night, I found what looked like a burn on that shoulder.

http://www.bewisepolarize.com/man-made%20emf%20sources.htm

Our cheap transistor radios can pick up and separate out hundreds of radio signals at levels of a few hundreds of microvolts/metre. More sophisticated communications receivers can work down to levels of about 10 microvolts/metre. Radio-astronomers work on informational signals from stars at less than 1 microvolt/metre - this is a power level of about 0.000 000 000 001 microwatt/cm2 (1 attowatt/cm2 !!). We can now detect and create pictures from signals from spacecraft at our outer planets using transmit powers similar to those use by mobile phones of a few watts!

Honeybees have been shown to be sensitive to magnetic flux differences of 1 nanotesla (10 microGauss) [4][Theoretically humans could also be sensitive down to less than this level (pineal thermal noise c. 0.24 nanotesla - Smith, 1985). Various sea creatures can detect voltage gradients of a few 10's of microvolts/metre.

Biological stochastic resonance from regular pulsing EMFs can effectively amplify coherent signals (like power EMFs) by vast amounts.

What arrogant nonsense to suggest that living systems need to be "cooked" before they realize they are being bombarded by signals and that microwaves of 100 volts/metre are harmless to us.

http://members.aol.com/gotemf/emf/animals.htm

Honey bees navigate by observing changes as small as 0.6% in the Earth's magnetic field (2.5 mG out of 400 mG). Other studies have shown that other animals, such as sea turtles and homing pigeons, can navigate using the Earth's magnetic field as a guide. In order to navigate to precision, it is necessary to have many magnetosomes with a permanent dipole moment which are able to maintain their direction in the Earth's magnetic field while being buffeted by Brownian thermal fluctuations.

V.3. Animals: Honey bees follow B fields (Walker/Bitterman, J. Comp. Physiol. 157, 67-73, 1995, and Science 265, 95, 1994) down to a few mG DC accuracy and sea turtles turn when B varies at earth's locations (Science 264, 661 (1994).

42. "Honeybees Can Be Trained to Respond to Very Small Changes in Geomagnetic Field Intensity," M.M. Walker and M.E. Bitterman, J. Exp. Biology 145, 489-494 (1989). (A)

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Although the major trouble seems to be in the US, beekeepers in many European countries are also reporting heavy losses. Perhaps we should not concentrate, therefore, on one particular system of electromagnetic emissions. Other candidates that have world wide effects are the HAARP ionospheric heaters and the explosive growth of the cellular communications system in just about every country.

Mobile phone providers are covering the earth with a fine-mesh network of microwave-emitting senders and repeaters, in addition to the billions of mobile phones we are using.

One of the major points of trouble seems to be that the radiations from mobile phones have passed from analog to digital in the last few years, which means they are pulsed at around 220 "packets" per second. That frequency is very close to the native frequency of the bees' hum, which has been measured to be in the range of 190 to 250 cycles per second.

There are those who warn of health dangers of the mobile phone craze, but the mainstream response seems to be "here comes the tinfoil hat brigade".

Are we going to run our of food before we realize what we're doing?

Dr George Carlo: Radiation Is Killing the Bees
Colony collapse disorder has occurred concurrently on four continents within a very short time frame. If the reason was biological or chemical, there would be a pattern of epidemic spread .... we would be able to trace the spread of bee disappearance or Colony Collapse Disorder from a source similar to the spread of SARS a few years ago. That is not the case. The condition has hit each continent at roughly the same time. That would mean the cause has to have hit the continents at the same time as well. Mobile phones meet that criterion.

TerryRC wrote:When the hive gets weak enough, the normally harmless virus finishes them off, usually by disorienting the workers to the point they can't find their way back while foraging, meaning the hive starves.

Just my two cents.

TerryRC wrote:Anybody want my opinion? No?

Well too bad. Here is is anyhow.

There exists in most colonies of bees, a virus. Consider it something like the common cold in humans. It is found in perfectly healthy hives.

The hives in this country (and others) have been weakened by mites (varroa and tracheal varieties). I also think sub-lethal doses of the systemic insecticide imacloprid play into weakening the hives, also.

When the hive gets weak enough, the normally harmless virus finishes them off, usually by disorienting the workers to the point they can't find their way back while foraging, meaning the hive starves.

Just my two cents.

TerryRC wrote:And you can provide proof that all those "collapsed hives" are completely absent of any stored honey, ......... RIGHT.

Not all of them. Some of them died because there weren't enough workers to feed the brood. Do a little research on the subject, Sam. I'm sure in a day or so, you will know more about it than an entomologist and someone that has kept bees for the past twelve years.

The life of all honey bees starts as an egg, about the size of a comma "," which is laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell in the brood area of a hive. A worker egg hatches after 3 days into a larva. Nurse bees feed it royal jelly at first, then pollen & honey for 6 days. It then becomes an inactive pupa. During its 14 days as a pupa, sealed in a capped cell, it grows into a worker (female) bee, emerging on the 20th day.

For the first three weeks (21 days) of their adult lives, the workers confine their labors to building the honeycomb, cleaning and polishing the cells, feeding the young and the queen, controlling the temperature, evaporating the water from the nectar until it thickens as honey, and many other miscellaneous tasks. At the end of this period, they function as field bees and defenders of the colony.

TerryRC wrote:I'm sure glad that Mother Nature is smarter than what you think you are.

Make your point Sam. Did you have an issue with one of my statements or are you just being an ass?

When a hive starts to decline, particularly if the emerging workers are stunted or handicapped from mite feeding in the brood cells, the bees will abandon the hive, often leaving honey behind.

I can go more in depth, giving you a chance to try and show me up, if you like.

EM signals have been around for awhile. Considering that why would this happen with the bees almost overnight?