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And … they’re off! The media, already starting to smell a good old-fashioned “fear culture” story with the bee disappearance, jumped all over this new connection as the next in a long line of stories exploiting our discomfort with complex modern technology. Throw the word “radiation” and “extinction” together with an electronic object we all hold up to our ears for minutes or hours per day, and you’ve got a crackin’ story, brother! A Google search of “bees AND cell phones” will tell you all you need to know about how fast the story spread around the internets, and the news portal Digg reports over 1300 hits for the original story, with an ensuing discussion that counter-proposes a “bee rapture” and bees’ ability to exist in six simultaneous dimensions as alternate CCD explanations.
There’s a less exciting rebuttal to the cell phone-bee relationship, however; The Independent just read the damn study wrong. A quick reading of Kimmel’s paper shows that 1) it was a small pilot study with very subtle results and 2) they didn’t even use freaking cellular phones in the study. What Kimmel and friends actually tested was the ability of cordless phone base stations that were actually placed inside beehives, to throw off the navigation of bees. Bees were marked as they were leaving their hives (not a fun job, I imagine), and then hives with implanted phone stations were compared to non-phoned-up hives to see how many bees came back. In the end, bees were less likely to return to the hives with the electromagnetic radiation-spouting cordless phone bases, but only by the slimmest of statistically significant margins: 63% for the control group vs. 55% in the experimental groups.
Obviously then, the jump from this short, humble little paper to “OH MY GOD CELL PHONES WILL KILL US ALL” requires a bit of creative license on the part of the newspaper. Caught in the middle were the researchers themselves, who were probably sitting around on April 14th muttering “nobody ever cares about our work” only to be wistfully recalling their long-lost obscurity by the 16th. As reported here and here and here, Kimmel and Kuhn were shocked by the distortion of their study, saying they never set out to study CCD, and bemoaning the media attention: “It's not my fault if people misinterpret our data,” said an obviously flustered Kimmel to the International Herald Tribune. “Ever since The Independent wrote their article, for which they never called or wrote to us, none of us have been able to do any of our work because all our time has been spent in phone calls and e-mails trying to set things straight. This is a horror story for every researcher to have your study reduced to this. Now we are trying to force things back to normal.”
I've added this site, anywhere which has science content, urban legends and a sense of humour as evidenced by referring to Science In the News as SIN.
