

Mobile phone-induced honeybee worker piping - llambda
http://www.springerlink.com/content/bx23551862212177/fulltext.html

======
pdx
This is what happens when biologists start playing with electronics.

To make this is more valid experiment, I would mount the telephones remotely,
and use external antenna in the hive, fed via coax from the remote telephones.

Their control of a telephone in standby was not a good control. The standby
telephone has it's power supply in a low current state to save battery power.
This results in a couple of things.

There is significantly less heat generated by a standby telephone than an
active telephone. Bees respond to temperature.

Modern electronics use switching power supplies. These switch currents through
inductors at high frequency to step the battery voltage to the IC's operating
voltage at high efficiency. You can often hear these switching supplies, as
they cause the inductors to "sing", as the high frequency is demodulated down
into the audible band by component imperfections. So, the bees may be
responding to acoustic noise from the power supply.

We have no idea what else is going on in these phones. is there a backlight on
the LCD? If it's electroluminscent, that also can sometimes be heard, as it
has it's own, much higher voltage supply. If it's LED, that will be generating
heat.

If the experiment is repeated, please use remote telephones with external
antenna in the hive.

------
FilterJoe
Cited study here:

[http://www.springerlink.com/content/bx23551862212177/fulltex...](http://www.springerlink.com/content/bx23551862212177/fulltext.pdf)

The study's conclusion is far less dramatic then the sensationalized headline
implies, but does include the following lines:

"Further confirmation of the current results and their implications regarding
a direct correlation between erratic honeybee behavior and mobile phone-
generated electromagnetic fields would substantiate one more explanation for
the “disappearance” of bee colonies around the world. This phenomenon accounts
for 43% of all bee losses, apart from overwintering (39%), mite disease, (15%)
and pesticides (3%) as recently described in a national survey performed in
the United States (Bee Alert Technology 2007). Experiments should be
undertaken to establish the correlation between the time necessary for the
onset of worker piping and the intensity of the electromagnetic fields present
in the vicinity of the beehive. For future experiments, in complement to the
present original study and in order to reach more “natural” conditions, mobile
phone apparatuses should be placed at various increasing distances away from
the hives. Video recordings showing the modifications in the bees’ behavior in
the hive should also be performed."

~~~
llambda
I think you're confused: the original link doesn't cite a study, it's the full
text of the study in HTML format.

~~~
FilterJoe
Whoops - I confused two Hacker News items with similar headlines. I meant to
reply to this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2537772>

------
r00fus
Unfortunately, it doesn't elaborate on which cell phone models were used in
the cited study:
[http://www.springerlink.com/content/bx23551862212177/fulltex...](http://www.springerlink.com/content/bx23551862212177/fulltext.pdf)

I'll assume they didn't choose phones with additional antennae activated (ie,
bluetooth, GPS, wifi), but that wasn't detailed either.

Also since they focused on 900Mhz GSM, I wonder if CDMA/TDMA or non-900Mhz GSM
would change results... assuming equivalent specific energy adsorption rate
(SAR), of course.

~~~
llambda
The original link is the full text of the study, in HTML format, not a
citation thereof. If PDF is your preference it's already been linked in the
comments here.

------
VladRussian
>the induction of worker piping which was regularly observed about 25 to 40
min after the onset of the mobile phone communication.

prolonged talkers drive crazy even bees

------
joe_the_user
This is fairly amazing stuff.

I would be interested in any further breakdown of this folks here might do...

