Sunday, April 15, 2007

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder and Cell Phones

This story is popping up all over, apparently due to the possible correlation with cell phone use.  It's funny that "four years left before we all starve to death" doesn't get big headlines, but "cell phones might cause bee colonies to collapse" does... The graduate optimization class that my wife TAs at Stanford just finished their class project.  It was to write code to optimize food production given that you need to allocate some land for natural bee colonies.  Apparently a lot of the commercial bee colonies get trucked around to do their jobs from field to field, and bee colony collapse has been causing a lot of problems with this system.  Whatever the cause, decentralization of bee production seems like a good idea.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have just written a brief article about ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ which you might find of interest   http://fishinsects.suite101.com/article.cfm/colony_collapse_disorder  

Anonymous said...

the current flap points up our weakness as biologists who seem to believe honeybees are our only pollinators.