Cell Phones, Scourge of Honeybees?

Technology has always come at a price. (Just ask Prometheus.) And it seems that, yet again, we may have come to a point where we have to ask ourselves if it's worth it.

For a few years now, honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing from hives across North America and Europe. It's one of those things that didn't exactly make headline news, but perplexed (and, let's be blunt, scared) the people who knew about it. It's not just a matter of having a little less sweetener for your tea -- honeybees handle a fair bit of nature's pollination chores, including for the crops that we eat.

A new German study suggests that we might actually be at the core of the problem -- or more specifically, our cell phone usage might be. The study has found that the radiation emitted by phones operating in the 900 to 1800 MHz range interferes with our apian pals' ability to find their hives and communicate with each other. Mass hive desertion means mass bee death.

There's still work to be done to determine if cell phones are the major reason or just one of several factors at work, but let's just say for the sake of argument that they are. What next? How many people would stop or at least drastically decrease their cell phone usage if they learned that doing so would, at least indirectly, save us from crop shortages and/or increased food prices? My bet is, not many. If there's one thing the modern world has illustrated, it's that we're great when it comes to short-term gratification and not so hot on the long-term planning, even when the results are potentially catastrophic. A lot of people thought that cell phones increased the chances of getting cancer during the time cell phone adoption skyrocketed -- even when we're directly involved, we don't seem to fret too much. (Luckily, it turned out that there wasn't really a link between the two.) But if we don't dodge that bullet the next time around, are we prepared to cut back on the convenience for our collective good? Are you?