Guess it boils down to: would you rather talk on your cellphone, or eat? Having knocked off most of the native pollinators with pesticides, we're dependent on bees to pollinate most crops that aren't wind-pollinated. The disappearance of bees is a serious problem, not a joke. Nearly every non-grain food we eat depends on bee pollination. So if we don't want to live on a diet of corn flakes (corn is wind-pollinated), we may have to make a few choices.
Left unexplained in these studies, however, is the question of WHY NOW. Cellphones have been around for quite some time; Colony Collapse Syndrome (bee disappearance) is very recent--it's only occurred in the last year or two. So why is this happening now? Has the number of cellphone towers reached some critical threshold? Fortunately, the experiments that link bee disappearances with the presence of cellphones are just early studies, and don't necessarily correlate with the behavior of bees in the wild; other causes for Colony Collapse Syndrome may be found--or other contributing causes, if the particular frequencies used by cellphones are only a piece of the puzzle. We're constantly being told that cellphones are the future of computing and the Internet, and that in the future, you're going to be able to use your new, super-duper cellphone to do anything from a spreadsheet--to a meeting with company execs in Tierra del Fuego and Bangalore--to buying, and watching, a Major Motion Picture--to downloading a recipe for tonight's dinner from the Times or Gourmet Today, and sending the ingredients list to your favorite market, so that the groceries will be waiting for you when you get home. (Coming next: you'll be able to plug the phone into your Microwave and the thing will cook the food for you, too. If you can't do that already.) But if this bee thing is actually caused by cellphone towers, the coming Golden Age of Cellphones may have to be revised a little bit. If I were one of the High Mucky-Mucks of the electronics and communications industry, I would start looking around for alternatives, or at least harm-reduction measures. Or we can just go ahead as if nothing happened, and forget about the bees. I can just picture it now: corn flakes for breakfast, cornbread with corn oil margarine for lunch, tortillas with a few rare and expensive beans for dinner, corn pudding for dessert. Tomorrow morning: breakfast, corn-meal mush. Lunch, more corn bread. . . . -----Original Message----- From: Computer Guys Announcements and Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tony B Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 12:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CGUYS] The disappearance of bees... We can live without cell phones, but not bees. I vote we shut off cell phones immediately, and limit wireless networks to low power. On 4/18/07, Steve Rigby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The prime suspect in the disappearance of bees all over the world are > telecommunication radiations in the higher frequencies. This applies > to cell phones and all sorts of other microwave propagation currently > in great vogue, including wireless computing. ************************************************************************ * ==> QUICK LIST-COMMAND REFERENCE - Put the following commands in <== * ==> the body of an email & send 'em to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <== * Join the list: SUBSCRIBE COMPUTERGUYS-L Your Name * Too much mail? Try Daily Digests command: SET COMPUTERGUYS-L DIGEST * Tired of the List? Unsubscribe command: SIGNOFF COMPUTERGUYS-L * New address? From OLD address send: CHANGE COMPUTERGUYS-L YourNewAddress * Need more help? Send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************************************************************ * List archive at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ * RSS at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml * Messages bearing the header "X-No-Archive: yes" will not be archived ************************************************************************ ************************************************************************ * ==> QUICK LIST-COMMAND REFERENCE - Put the following commands in <== * ==> the body of an email & send 'em to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <== * Join the list: SUBSCRIBE COMPUTERGUYS-L Your Name * Too much mail? Try Daily Digests command: SET COMPUTERGUYS-L DIGEST * Tired of the List? Unsubscribe command: SIGNOFF COMPUTERGUYS-L * New address? From OLD address send: CHANGE COMPUTERGUYS-L YourNewAddress * Need more help? Send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************************************************************ * List archive at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ * RSS at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml * Messages bearing the header "X-No-Archive: yes" will not be archived ************************************************************************
