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.
More Here: http://gizmodo.com/5801879/study-posits-cellphones-might-be-killing-off-the-honeybees
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