Study Posits Cellphones Might Be Killing Off the Honeybees [Bees!]

Jack Loftus ?Long has the debate raged about cellphone radiation and brain tumors, with the current consensus being cellphones are, and have been safe. Let's add a caveat, though: They're safe so long as you are not a honeybee.

If you're a honeybee, then the magnetic fields these invaluable handsets emanate at all hours of the day could (stress: could) be killing you. At least, that's what a new study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is saying this week.

According to the study, a pigment within the honeybee called cryptochrome absorbs the magnetic field and begins to interfere with the insect's ability to navigate and communicate with other bees. For a hive-based community dependent on worker bees flying off far from the nest for pollen, that's tantamount to a doomsday scenario. But is it as bad as the study suggests?

Possibly, yes. The effect has been studied for a few years now; this recent report is imply further research on a theory. That said, if there is an issue, a fix could be as simple as "changing the channel," says biologist Andrew Goldsworthy:

[Goldsworthy] suggests a change of phone frequencies would keep the bees from being confused: "It's possible to modify the signal coming from the phones and the base station in such a way that it doesn't produce the frequencies that disturb the cryptochrome molecules."

The humble honeybee, as we've heard countless times before, is an integral part of our ecosystem. They pollinate a majority of the Earth's crops and on a monetary scale account for about $12 billion in agricultural costs and impact. That's just in the U.S., mind you. [ZDNET via DVICE]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/oJcsya2v9SI/study-posits-cellphones-might-be-killing-off-the-honeybees

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