A 2003 study from Germany's Landau University may provide some clues to the mystery behind our nation's disappearing honeybee population. Landau's Jochen Kuhn placed the receivers to cellular phones within honeybee hives, exposing the bees to the radiation that the phones give off. Kuhn found that as many as 70% of the bees would refuse to come back to the hive, speculating that it somehow effected the waggle dance which bees use to communicate foraging information with one another. Researchers studying Colony Collapse Disorder, now familiar with Kuhn's work, believe this same radiation may effect a honeybee's natural navigation, which would potentially keep it from returning home.

A good summary of the issue, as well as the alleged connection to cellular phones, is available here.

So, are cellular phones to blame for CCD? Possibly, but it seems unlikely.

First of all, CCD has occurred all over the place - in the United States and throughout the world - not just in places with high mobile-phone usage. One cannot say for certain, but one imagines that cellular phone radiation doesn't bleed from its source of emission to the rest of the world like, say, carbon dioxide. If cellular radiation was the sole reason for CCD, wouldn't it occur first, and most severely, in places with high concentrations of cell phone use?

Second, and perhaps more convincingly, the cellular phone radiation hypothesis does not explain why other bees, predators, and scavengers - which would otherwise pounce on the opportunity to raid or co-opt an unguarded honeybee hive - avoid the abandoned hives.

Regardless of its cause, CCD is starting to be a big hairy deal, and policy-makers and business leaders better figure out how to deal with it pronto, or we'll have quite the little food shortage. According to Albert Einstein, if honeybees disappeared from the face of the earth "man would have only four years of life left."

Whatever. He was a physicist. He probably doesn't even know what he's talking about.