In These New Times

The insane nonsense about climate change is simply de riguer and should be discounted: bees have survived millions of years of climate change including dramatic and catastrophic climate alterations far beyond anything we are experiencing at the moment. What matters here is that the disappearance of the honey bee so apparent in the West is also happening in India and that, unlike here, the connection of CCD to EM radiation provenant from the mobile phone network is being investigated at official level.

Hindu

9th May, 2011

KOLLAM: Honey production, both wild and from apiaries across the State, has registered a fall for the third consecutive year.

Honey is harvested from the wild normally by Adivasi communities between mid-March and August. Tribesman Chemban from an Adivasi settlement in the Idamalayar forest range told The Hindu that honeybees seem to be disappearing from the forest areas soon after forming colonies.

Various factors have been attributed to this development, which is formally termed colony collapse disorder (CCD). Topping the list is climate change. Robert Leo, programme coordinator for the Nilgiri-based Keystone Foundation, said bees migrate and in the wild make beehives on treetops basically to breed and for food. Bees desert the hives if they are unable to find sufficient quantities of pollen and nectar for the first and second phase of nesting when they start storing surplus honey. Honey is harvested from the second phase beehive. Climate change can make the blooms lose pollen and nectar. Unseasonable rain and wind can cause this phenomenon. When bees encounter food shortage, they migrate after discarding the second phase nesting, Mr. Leo said. This is what is apparently happening to bees now in the Western Ghats.

Honey production from apiaries too has registered a fall owing to the CCD factor. Environment activist and noted zoologist Sainudeen Pattazhy said till some years ago, honeybees from apiaries visiting flowers was a common sight. However, it is a rare sight now.

Dr. Pattazhy had extensively studied this phenomenon and come to the conclusion that electromagnetic radiation (EMD) emitted from the rapidly proliferating mobile phone towers was another prime cause for CCD, especially in apiaries. Dr. Pattazhy’s finding have received worldwide recognition and he is on the expert committee constituted by the Union Ministry for Environment and Forests to study the impact of EMD from mobile on bees and birds.

Dr. Pattazhy said radiation from mobile phone towers was highly bioactive, causing significant alteration in the psychological function of organisms such as honeybees. This, in turn, makes homing difficult for the bees, resulting in CCD.