Editorial

A couple of years ago, two scientists in India set out to test the notion that electromagnetic radiation from cell telephones might be connected with colony collapse disorder. The work of Ved Parkash Sharma and Neelima R. Kumar made it to print in May in the journal Current Science, a publication of the Indian Academy of Science.

The bad buzz of the three-page scientific paper gained circulation in Western news media in late June. What the two researchers at Panjab University proved is that if you put a couple of cell phones in a working bee hive and transmit signals twice a day -- at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. -- for 15-minute exposures, life in the hive comes to a halt after three months.

As one wag observed, none of us has ever seen a cell-phone-equipped bee hive. And if a beekeeper were packing a cell phone and took a call, in the real world the phone won't be inside the hive. In fact, it would probably be many feet away before the first outgoing signal was sent, after the beekeeper demasked so he could get the phone up to his ear.

There's been speculation for years that cell phone transmissions might be a factor in colony collapse disorder. Before you dismiss the theory, you need to know that some bees do indeed grow magnetite, a crystalline iron oxide, within their bodies. It is thought that the magnetite, reacting to the earth's magnetic fields, is part of the reason honeybees -- and homing pigeons -- keep themselves on course while in flight.

German research in 2007 showed that bees in flight lost their direction when crossing paths of electromagnetic radiation.

However, the only citation Sharma and Kumar make for an assertion that "radiation is killing the bees" is a 3-year-old Internet post in German attributed to a Washington, D.C., think tank that believes the cell phone industry is hoodwinking the public about the effects of radio signals.

What we know from the Indian study is that bees don't like living in colonies that have two active cell phones as furniture. It doesn't -- as the Indian paper claims -- suggest "that colony collapse disorder does occur as a result of exposure to cell phone radiation."

That's a bad buzz for science.

A recent paper in the Journal of Apicultural Research declares that the causes of colony collapse disorder remain under investigation. An exotic virus, first described in 2007, is at the top of the authors' list of suspects, "although it is not believed to be the sole cause of CCD." Cell phone radiation isn't included in the list of hypotheses still considered worth investigating.