Alan Riach wrote:
        >There has been much discussion about the effect of high voltage
lines on
>all sorts of organisms, humans and  farm animals as well as bees, but no
>hard evidence of a direct damage mechanism.

        I may be reading too much in, but I do hope this statement isn't
meant to imply that we shouldn't believe there's any effect until we have a
good hypothesis for its mechanism.
        There are many phenomena whose mechanisms we don't (yet) understand
much if at all, but which are real effects nonetheless.   It has become
distressingly common among scientists this past half-century to say 'we
have no mechanism for how this proposed effect might work, so we disbelieve
that it could work'.  Acupuncture has been an example.  This pattern of
reasoning is an outrage against the scientific method, but as I say it has
become awfully common.  Beekeepers of all people should be against this
type of prejudice: many phenomena in the life of the bee are unexplained
but are certainly real.


> Because of the fast fall off
>in field strength with distance

        One shouldn't assume this falloff is monotonic.  A paper in
Wireless World a decade ago discussed how the shape of the field gradient
could focus cosmic rays (highly ionizing radiation, which of course the
actual 50Hz or 60 Hz mains fields are not) and offered evidence (from big
Geiger counters) that it is so.


>However the possibility of indirect effects are perhaps more possible.
>
>There has been some research carried out in the UK (I think at Bristol
>Univ.-forgive me if I've got the wrong institution), on the effects of
>the electrostatic fields under power lines in concentrating polution
>particles.

        This is a parallel hypothesis.  Both could be true.

        But the primary question is whether there are biological effects.
*How* they might work is a secondary question.

R

-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878   Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
                (9) 524 2949