What's killing the honey bees?

For the past few years, honey bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate.

No one seemed to know what was killing them or what unseen force could kill so many bees on such a large scale. A bee flu? Climate change? It's been well-documented that life on Earth cannot survive without pollination from bees.

Then today, this story from India:

Mobile towers are posing a threat to honey bees in Kerala withe electromagnetic radiation from mobile towers and cell phones having the potential to kill worker bees that go out to collect nectar from flowers, says a study.

A plunge in beehive population has been reported from different parts of Kerala and if measures are not taken to check mushrooming of mobile powers, bees could be wiped out from Kerala within a decade, environmentalist and Reader in Zoology, Dr Sainudeen Pattazhy says in his study.

In one of his experiments he found that when a mobile phone was kept near a beehive it resulted in collapse of the colony in five to 10 days, with the worker bees failing to return home, leaving the hives with just queens, eggs and hive-bound immature bees.

It makes sense. Bees are disappearing in areas as the ubiquitousness of cell coverage has increased dramatically. And many bees are transported across country to pollenate crops. They are loaded in hives on large trucks and literally driven to the next pollination field. In rural America, there didn't used to be cell service everywhere - it was confined to larger towns and the cities. But now, you can travel just about anywhere and get a cell signal. The trucks are literally death trains for the bees.

So what do we do about it? The knee-jerk reaction is to ban cell phones, but that would collapse our economy. I think a more inventive solution will arise: bee farms with cell jamming stations around its perimeter. And cell-jamming technology on the trucks that carry the bees. Or perhaps genetically engineer bees that are not susceptible to cell radiation. But will that make them more aggressive? Playing around with nature is usually not a good thing.

This issue, to me, dwarfs global warming a potential threat to life on our planet. This one is very real.