Mobile Phones already fry your brains, make you impotent, bring down aeroplanes and explode petrol stations, but this just about beats the lot. The mobile phone could now be responsible for global food shortages because of the disorienting effect they have on bees!

There has been a widescale disappearance of bees recently, up to 80% of the population in some bee communities, which sounds to me like a very good thing, but apparently isn’t at all.

Bees are responsible for the pollination of many of the world’s crop families, and they are imported in their millions to commercial crop plantings to facilitate the growth of crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberrys and melons.

Albert Einstein once claimed that “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left“.

But they’re starting to lose their way! A phenomenon called CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) occurs when a large proportion of the inhabitants of the hive disappears, leaving only the Queen, the eggs and a few immature worker bees.

No one appears to know why this is happening, so, like a lot of things we don’t understand, it’s probably something to do with mobile phones. The radiation from mobile phones is thought to interfere with the bees’ navigating systems causing them to lose their way back to the hive. Dr George Carlo, a prominent researcher into the dangers of mobile phones has said “I’m convinced the possibility is real”.

Turns out there’s not any actual evidence for this, other than a bit of research done by Landau University that claims to show that bees fail to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. The Independent has described this study as ‘limited’.

It doesn’t explain how the bees seem to be picking up the mobile phone signal so well in the middle of the country when my phone becomes completely inactive anywhere outside a major city.

And more scientifically, one of the peculiar things about CCD is that the abandoned hives have not been raided by pests and other wildlife, which suggests that the deterrent is within the hives themselves.

If only mobile phones could be adapted to kill wasps.