Bees, Cell Phones and Bad Activists
When I was up in Ithaca last weekend, I went to the Farmer’s Market, which is excellent. On a bulletin board there, someone had pinned up a sign saying that people shouldn’t use cell phones, because they’re the reason for the massive bee dieoffs that have been in the news lately.
Only, it turns out that isn’t true, or at least there isn’t any particular reason to believe that it is true. There’s exactly one study on the subject, and what it actually found is that the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by cordless phones (those are the kind that you plug into a landline connection) may (note that word, “may”) interfere with bees’ ability to find their way back to their hive. Cordless phones use a completely different set of frequencies from cell phones, and there’s no reason to assume that this result would transfer. Also, this is only one study with a rather tentative result anyway.
Now, I don’t particularly fault this Ithacan activist for initially misinterpreting the study–if what he saw was a mainstream media report about it, well, a lot of mainstream media reports got it wrong. What I do fault him for is taking the results of a single, small study, not doing the research to figure out what that study really found in the first place, and immediately going off into a half-cocked “OMG WE MUST GET RID OF ALL OUR CELL PHONES RIGHT NOW!1!! TEHY’RE KILLING ALL TEH BEES!1!!11!!oneone!!”. I have to kind of suspect that the activist had a pre-existing hatred of cell phones, and took the opportunity to bash them.
Hysteria like that makes more thoughtful environmentalists look bad–it makes us all look like Chicken Littles, and means that people won’t take the real threats seriously.
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