Small, portable, stylish: How cell phones may bring death of bees

Bart Cubrich is a freshman Gateway staff writer and an avid environmentalist.
Small. Portable. Stylish.

This is what the new BlackBerry phone boasts, as well as e-mail, IM, web browser, camera, media player, GPS, touch-ball mouse and an organizer/planner. Sounds great right?

Unfortunately, it also comes with something the cell phone companies won't tell you about.

It's called radio frequency radiation, and it is known to painfully inflict symptoms on people living 100 meters from the towers such as: dizziness, nausea, memory loss, inability to concentrate, irritability, rise in blood pressure, pressure behind the eyeballs, joint pains, high-pitched noises in their ears, itchy systemic rash and even internal bleeding. This is known as radio wave sickness.

I think one of the major issues here is that anyone is susceptible to these effects. It is not fair for people who don't use cell phones, whether they are too young or just don't need them, to be afflicted because everyone else wants the conveniences of a quick chat or text.

But, these are not the only problem cell phones cause and, in my opinion, are not the worst. Millions of bees are dying, just leaving their hives never to return. These along with a plethora of other animal life, particularly those that fly are quickly dying off.

Bees are not weak creature, even leaving their hives in the dead of winter with relatively low deaths. Bees use the earth's magnetic field, in correspondence to the sun, and cell phones disturb this. The bees fly away and starve to death.

This never came as a surprise, after all cell phones a very new invention, if you consider that cars are a century old. We are still discovering their effect on the environment daily.

So how does this affect me? Bees pollinate plants, trees and flowers. They are not the only creatures to do this, but they do most of the work. Farmers use movable beehives to pollinate their crop.

If the bees go, the farmers will have to come up with a new way to pollinate, or a vast percentage of crops will yield no fruit, one-third of the worlds food supply is pollinated by creatures such as bees. Bees pollinate 90 percent of apples, which would represent a $40 million dollar loss, according to a study done by Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. It would also devastate an entire food chain of animals that prey on bees, their larva and the plants they pollinate.

Note that this is only happening in the U.S.; most other countries, including our close neighbors Mexico and Canada, are unaffected.

Europe is not a continent where cell phones are uncommon, yet they remain virtually unaffected. Perhaps Europe's use of satellites and less frequent use of towers could be the cause. In that case, a possible bifurcation would be to switch primary cell phone use in the U.S. from tower to satellite technology.

You never know what effects that might have, though, so if you really want to save the earth, cell phones need to evolve or die. Just like everything else in nature.

If they don't, you can expect to be paying high dollar for certain fruits and vegetables, if they even appear on the shelves.