In These New Times

Kev Boyle

No One To Vote For

22nd June, 2010

A major news item on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ show this morning was the announcement of a £10 million ‘Insect Pollinators Initiative’. The money will be spent trying to discover why our bees and other pollinating insects seem to be dying out.
This effect has been obvious to anyone with their eyes open for some years now. The disappearance of pollinators is clearly a potentially very serious issue indeed because of the possible effects on food production.

The puzzling thing about the interview with Professor Andrew Watkinson of the University of East Anglia (Uh-O, not those people who doctored their reports for the IPCC on ‘climate change’), was that during the interview it became clear that the most obvious candidate for causing the disappearance was not going to be investigated.

That candidate is the electromagnetic (microwave) ‘noise’ associated with mobile phones. This has become an all-pervasive, if invisible, reality in our environment.

I live on a main road in Croydon. We have lavender bushes in our small front garden. Not very long ago there were always, but always, numbers of bees buzzing round these plants at this time of year. However, for the past five years or so one never sees a honey bee and only very occasionally a bumble bee in the same garden.

Just before this change occurred the roof of an old Post Office building across the road was selected as a site for mobile phone masts. There are now two or three dozen masts on this roof (the roof is high and not all masts are visible from the street or even loft rooms).

The connection between the disappearance of the bees and the mobile phone masts is a very obvious one to make…….

….so why is this not amongst the issues being directly investigated by Professor Watkinson’s initiative?

WHY?

Here is a full list of projects funded:

Sustainable pollination services for UK crops
Dr Koos Biesmeijer, University of Leeds
Modelling systems for managing bee disease: the epidemiology of European Foulbrood
Dr Giles Budge, Food and Environment Research Agency
Investigating the impact of habitat structure on queen and worker bumblebees in the field
Dr Claire Carvell, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
An investigation into the synergistic impact of sublethal exposure to industrial chemicals on the learning capacity and performance of beesDr Chris Connolly, University of Dundee
Linking agriculture and land use change to pollinator populations
Professor Bill Kunin, University of Leeds
Urban pollinators: their ecology and conservationProfessor Jane Memmott, University of Bristol
Impact and mitigation of emergent diseases on major UK insect pollinatorsDr Robert Paxton, Queen’s University Belfast
Unravelling the impact of the mite Varroa destructor on the interaction between the honeybee and its virusesDr Eugene Ryabov, University of Warwick
Can bees meet their nutritional needs in the current UK landscape?Dr Geraldine Wright, Newcastle University

To my simple mind it simply beggars belief that this team of funded truthseekers are studiously avoiding carrying out an investigation into the prime suspect.

What can possibly be going on here? Professor watkinson says here that, “…….A lot of the problems in the past come from the fact that ecological research has been undertaken in a vacuum, divorced from political and governance issues of a country.”

Oh, really? You mean like your ‘climate change’ investigations? How comical is that?

So, is this research being funded by ‘Vodaphone’ or what?

I’d like to help out the good Professor a little by directing him to the following fairly random collection of articles on the subject:

Electromagnetic radiation from cellphones appears to alter the behaviour of bees, her experiments suggest and add fresh evidence to observations reported by a team of German researchers seven years ago.

Changes in honeybee behaviour and biology under the influence of cellphone radiations

..and here is an archive of similar articles.

Is identifying what is killing off the bees a bit like identifying suspects in the ‘War on Terror’?

Are our learned professors allowed to point the finger at absolutely anything provided it is not the guilty party?

……just asking