> Have you considered submitting that post as a letter 
> to the editor at NYT's or elsewhere? considering 
> the other outlets which also picked up that story it 
> would be refreshing to see someone debunk that story. 

No, I'd rather not waste my time trying to extract a
retraction from news outlets that merely echoed the
article in the "Independent".  I did send a copy to 
the "Independent", as they appeared to be the original
source, but I don't expect that anything will result.

Most importantly, I sent a copy to the Chairman of 
the last several IIAS conferences, as the journal 
of these conferences is where this highly questionable
work has been "published".  Others may also way to drop 
this fellow a line.  The more, the merrier.  :)

Prof. George E. Lasker
International Institute for Advanced Studies (I.I.A.S)
P.O. Box 3010
Tecumseh, ON N8N 2M3
Canada
[log in to unmask] 


Also, my list of criticisms only touched on the "big mistakes" 
that would be obvious to most any random beekeeper.

Kevin Hackett, Senior National Program Leader, USDA/ARS
(the designated liable party for all the USDA Bee Labs)
had a few things to add, but is far too shy to post
anything on the Internet, understandable given the 
nature of his day job.  He added the following, 
slightly more technical critiques, with (2) and (3) 
being, in my view, the "kiss of death".  One can calculate
the minimum sample size required for different 
statistical approaches, and he is correct - 25 bees
is simply far too small a sample for any common
statistical method.

1) Most honey bee colonies are kept in rural areas away from urban
areas with a high concentration of cell phone towers or cell phones. 
This past year while sampling CCD colonies in various parts of the 
U.S., USDA-ARS researchers were unable to remain in cell phone contact, 
emphasizing the lack of cell phone-associated EMR on bee colonies in 
rural areas.
  
2) In the very small study in question, base stations of mobile
phones (these stations send out electromagnetic signals to mobile
phones) were placed in a few hives, which would expose the bees to 
unnaturally high levels of EMR; yet, researchers were only able to
demonstrate marginal and not statistically significant effects.    

3) There were experimental flaws in the study: E.g., the number of
bees sampled (25) was very small, leaving the chance that some bees 
were quite different physiologically and behaviorally (trained vs. 
untrained); 200 bees is a more traditional sampling size for colony 
studies.  

4) It was also not clear whether there was an experimental
(non-electromagnetic) object to control for the physical intrusion 
of the base stations in the hive.  Any object placed in the hive 
may cause some bee distress.  

5) The paper also states that the bees were exposed to the tip of
the station's antenna, which might give off very high levels of 
radiation; if the tip was not insulated, contact with it might 
cause physiological effects on the bees, even shocking or burning 
them. Importantly, since radiation exposure falls off very 
precipitously from the tip of the station's antenna, it is almost 
impossible to extrapolate what might happen to bees in the field 
near mobile phone nodes/towers (which are another form of base station). 
There are numerous factors that are or may be impacting honey bee health; 
electromagnetic radiation is not high on this list.  

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